In many areas of science, the contribution of early Islam is sometimes open to interpretation and shifts of opinion, but when it comes to numbers and mathematics the legacy is immense and indisputable. The very numbers in use in our world every day for everything from buying food to calculating the spin on an atomic particle are called Arabic numerals, because they came to the West from scholars who wrote in Arabic. What’s more, with al-Khwarizmi’s algebra, these scholars provided us with the single most important mathematical tool ever devised, and one that underpins every facet of science, as well as more everyday processes.
