From The Archives: Al-Khwarizmi Does The Math
I currently have my head down trying to finish a big project that I'm excited about. Instead of driving myself crazy trying to write blog posts at the same time or, worse, "going dark" I'll be running some of my favorite posts from the past for the next little while. Enjoy. And I'll see you soon.
Commemorative stamp in honor of al-Khwarizmi issued by the Soviet Union in 1983
Quick: multiply DVII by XVIII. Before you could work the problem you translated it into Arabic numbers didn't you?
The person you can thank, or blame, for your ability to multiply and divide is the mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (ca. 783-847), whose name lives on in a mangled form as "algorithm. (Honest. Take a moment to sound it out.)
We know very little about al-Khwarizmi's life. His name suggests he was born in the region of Khwarazm in what is now Uzbekistan. There are suggestions that he was a Zoroastrian, who may have converted to Islam.
We know a lot about al-Khwarizmi's work as a scholar in al-Mansur's court in Baghdad. He introduced what were then called "Hindu numerals" to the Muslim world. He produced an important astronomical chart (zij) that made it possible to calculate the positions of the sun, the moon and the major planets and to tell time based on stellar and solar observations.
Al-Khwarizmi's most important contribution to science was a ground-breaking mathematical treatise: al-Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi Hisab al-Jebr wal-Muqabala. The title translates to The Compendium on Calculation by Restoration and Balancing, but the book is most often referred to as al-jebr, or algebra. His treatise was a combination of mathematical theory and practical examples related to inheritances, property division, land measurements, and canal digging. He was the inventor both of quadratic equations and the dreaded word problem. (Some of his word problems became classics, which meant they were still giving schoolboys grief several centuries later.)
So, the next time you need to calculate "how long it will take for two cars to meet in Dubuque if one car leaves Minneapolis going 60 miles an hour and the other leaves Peoria traveling 75 miles an hour?" remember to thank al-Khwarizmi.
From The Archives: Why I Want To Go To Omaha
I currently have my head down trying to finish a big project that I'm excited about. Instead of driving myself crazy trying to write blog posts at the same time or, worse, "going dark" I'll be running some of my favorite posts from the past for the next little while. Enjoy. And I'll see you soon.
Aquatint by Karl Bodmer. Fort Pierre on the Missouri and the adjacent prairies c. 1833
Why is Omaha on my travel list? Two words, okay three: The Bodmer Collection.
In 1832, German naturalist Prince Maximilian zu Weid-Neuweid led one of the earliest expeditions to the American West.* As anyone who has snapped a picture of the Grand Canyon or the Grand Bazaar knows, expeditions need to be recorded. Instead of a Canon Powershot, Prince Maximilian brought along Karl Bodmer, a young Swiss artist with a talent for watercolor.
Prince Maximilian and Bodmer traveled the rivers of the American West for two years, going from Saint Louis to North Dakota and back. They saw an Indian raid, a wild prairie fire, and herds of buffalo and elk at close range. They suffered through a harsh winter in North Dakota, trapped by snow and bitter cold. At one point their boat caught fire.
Bodmer painted through it all, even when it was so cold that his paints froze solid. He captured images of the landscape, the animals, and. most notably, the Native American peoples they met. Bodmer’s depictions of the early American West have been described as the visual equivalent of Lewis and Clark’s journals. Although originally intended as “notes” to Prince Maximilian’s account of their journey, Bodmer’s paintings and sketches are now seen as the most important work of the expedition.
Today the Bodmer Collection is housed at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. Put it on your list.
*Prince Maximilian wasn't just a rich man with a yen for travel. He had a bee in his bonnet. He thought the native peoples of the Missouri and Mississippi river basins would help him prove that humankind developed from a single set of parents, presumably Adam and Eve.
In Manchuria
Michael Meyer's In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland And The Transformation of Rural China is a beautifully written blend of memoir, travel account, history and social commentary.
In 2011, Meyer moved to his Chinese wife's hometown--a Manchurian village with what proved to be the inappropriate name of Wasteland. He had lived in Beijing for several years and written about change in urban China (The Last Days of Old Beijing). Now he was interested in the question of rural China, which was slowly disappearing as a result of forces familiar to anyone who knows the blighted farm towns of the American Midwest.
In his account of his months in Wasteland, Meyer walks the fine and often funny line between being both insider and outsider, telling a story that is at once intensely personal and broadly political. He explores the unexpected agricultural richness of Wasteland, learning the fine points of rice cultivation in the process. He searches for the surprisingly illusory traces of Manchuria's history as China's frontier. (Only remnants remained of the Manchu dynasty's Willow Palisade, Japanese and Russian colonial cities, and a POW camp where survivors from the Bataan Death March were held.) And to his surprise, having expected to find the remains of China's past in Manchuria, he instead finds China's future in the form of Eastern Fortune-- a privately owned rice company that is in the process of transforming Wasteland from a commune to a company town.
In Manchuria is an engaging account of rural China poised on the brink of change.
This review previous appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers