Khwarizmi; The Persian mathematician and father of algebra.

Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, considered by Persian tradition to be among "the greatest mathematicians of all time," is the inventor of the modern principles of algebra and the person responsible for introducing Arabic numerals to the West. His formulations characterized the science of the early Middle Ages. The history of his name is also linked to a curious, yet trivial, translation error from Arabic to Latin—Al-Khwarizmi as Al-Gorithmi—which gave rise to the term "algorithm."

Al-Khwārizmī lived at the court of the caliph al-Ma'mūn, in the capital Baghdad. After the Islamic conquest of the Mesopotamian and Persian regions, the city had become a center of scientific studies and business, attracting scientists and merchants from every corner of the East (especially China and India). The caliph had continued the "patronage of knowledge" initiated by his father, building a manuscript library (the first after the one in Alexandria, which had been destroyed) to collect the most important works of the Byzantines. He also endowed the city with several astronomical observatories and a House of Wisdom—the Bayt al-Ḥikma—a sort of "academy" in which he supported scholars and the translation of Greco-Hellenistic scientific and philosophical texts (on which Al-Khwārizmī himself worked) to foster the flourishing of Arab culture.

His work "al-jabr wa'l muqabalah" laid the foundation for a systematic and logical approach to solving linear and quadratic equations, shaping the discipline of algebra. Yet al-Khwārizmī was not only a mathematician, but also an astronomer and geographer. He is credited with creating a complete map of the known world and with popularizing the positional numeral system, which also includes the use of zero, of Indian origin.