Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
A postage stamp issued by the USSR in
1983 to commemorate the 1200th
anniversary of Muhammad al-
Khowarizmi. Scanned by Donald Knuth,
one of the legends of computer science.
The Sieve of Eratosthenes is one of the first welldocumented
uses of an efficient algorithm-type solution
to solve a complex problem. The word algorithm is
derived from the Latin derivation of Al-Khowarizmi’s
name. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was an
Arab mathematician of the court of Mamun in Baghdad
born before 800 AD in central Asia, now called
Uzbekistan. Along with other Arabic mathematicians,
he is responsible for the proliferation of the base-ten
number system, which was developed in India. His
book on the subject of Hindu numerals was later
translated into the Latin text Liber Algorismi de
numero Indorum. While a scholar at the House of
Wisdom in Baghdad, he wrote Hisãb al-jabr w'almuqãbala
(from which the word "algebra" is derived).
Lose translations of this title could be “the science of
transposition and cancellation” or “the calculation of
reduction and restoration.” He devised a method to
restore or transpose negative terms to the other side of
an equation and reduce (cancel) or unite similar terms
on either side of the equation. Transposition means that a quantity can be added or
subtracted (multiplied or divided) from both sides of an equation and cancellation means
that if there are two equal terms on either side of an equation, they can be altogether
cancelled. The following is a translation of a popular verse in Arab schools from over six
hundred years ago:
Cancel minus terms and then
Restore to make your algebra;
Combine your homogeneous terms
And this is called muqabalah.
Robert of Chester translated this work into Latin in 1140 AD. Similar methods are still in
use in modern algebraic manipulations, which came in the sixteenth century from
Francois Viète. Al-Khowarizmi also claimed in his book Indorum (the book of Al-
Khowarizmi) that any complex mathematical problem could be broken down into
smaller, simpler sub-problems, whose results could be logically combined to solve the
initial problem. This is the main concept of an algorithm. Latin translations of his work
contributed to much of medieval Europe’s knowledge of mathematics. In 1202,
Leonardo of Pisa (otherwise known by his nickname Fibonacci) (c. 1175-1250) wrote the
8