---

The history of the word 'zero' is an informative tale.

The Arabs borrowed their numerical system - which is far better adapted to arithmetic than the Roman system - from ancient India. When they did so, they named the '0' al-sifr, literally 'void'. The Arabic word was Latinised as cephirum and cifra, which in Italy was deformed to zefero, and then zero. It is the latter which passed into English and French as the name for the symbol indicating the absence of quantity or magnitude. At the same time, French borrowed the Medieval Latin word cifra, transforming it into chiffre ('number'), to designate numerical characters in general. It is from this same origin that English derived the word 'cipher', originally designating both 'nought' and '[any] Arabic numeral', before taking on its present-day meaning of 'code' (from the technique of transposing letters according to a numerical key).

The history of mathematics is full of Arab inventions. The word 'algorithm', for example, comes from the name of the great mathematician Al-Khawarizmi, who is the father of algebra - another Arabic word, coming from the title of Al-Khawarizmi's work Kitab Al-Jabr (from jabara, 'to set bones'). The Arabs are also ultimately responsible for the fact that mathematicians the world over today use the letter 'x' to designate the unknown quantity - 'x' being the first letter of the Spanish word xay, which is a deformation of the Arabic shay, meaning simply 'thing'.

In the golden age of Arab science, mathematical research was frequently carried out by great polymaths such as the poet Omar Khayyam, who in addition to penning his famous Quatrains also proposed solutions for equations of the third degree. But such research generally had a practical end in mind, such as calculating surface areas in order to assist in urban planning, for example.

The study of astronomy was likewise encouraged with a view to practical ends, and more specifically with a view to predicting the future. On the basis of ancient Persian astrology, numerous Arab-Islamic scholars established longitudes, reformed the calendar, and went against Ptolemy's teachings by building a planetary model centred on the sun. Much later, Copernicus was in part inspired by their writings.

---

The Global Islamic population is approximately
> 1,200,000,000,
> >> or 20% of the world population.
> >> They received the following Nobel Prizes:


> >> Literature
> >> 1988 - Najib Mahfooz.
> >>
> >> Peace:
> >> 1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
> >> 1994 - Yaser Arafat
> >>
> >> Physics:
> >> 1990 - Elias James Corey
> >> 1999 - Ahmed Zewail
> >>
> >>
> >> Medicine:
> >> 1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
> >> 1998 - Ferid Mourad
> >>
> >> The Global Jewish population is aproximately
> 14,000,000 or
> >> about 0.02% of the world population.
> >> They received the following Nobel Prizes:
> >>
> >> Literature:
> >> 1910 - Paul Heyse
> >> 1927 - Henri Bergson
> >> 1958 - Boris Pasternak
> >> 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
> >> 1966 - Nelly Sachs
> >> 1976 - Saul Bellow
> >> 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
> >> 1981 - Elias Canetti
> >> 1987 - Joseph Brodsky
> >> 1991 - Nadine Gordimer World
> >>
> >> Peace:
> >> 1911 - Alfred Fried
> >> 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
> >> 1968 - Rene Cassin
> >> 1973 - Henry Kissinger
> >> 1978 - Menachem Begin
> >> 1986 - Elie Wiesel
> >> 1994 - Shimon Peres
> >> 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
> >>
> >> Chemistry:
> >> 1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
> >> 1906 - Henri Moissan
> >> 1910 - Otto Wallach
> >> 1915 - Richard Willstaetter
> >> 1918 - Fritz Haber
> >> 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
> >> 1961 - Melvin Calvin
> >> 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
> >> 1972 - William Howard Stein
> >> 1977 - Ilya Prigogine
> >> 1979 - Herbert Charle s Brown
> >> 1980 - Paul Berg
> >> 1980 - Walter Gilbert
> >> 1981 - Roald Hoffmann
> >> 1982 - Aaron Klug
> >> 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
> >> 1985 - Jerome Karle
> >> 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
> >> 1988 - Robert Huber
> >> 1989 - Sidney Altman
> >> 1992 - Rudolph Marcus
> >> 2000 - Alan J. Heeger
> >>
> >> Economics:
> >> 1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
> >> 1971 - Simon Kuznets
> >> 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
> >> 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
> >> 1976 -! Milton Friedman
> >> 1978 - Herbert A. Simon
> >> 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
> >> 1985 - Franco Modigliani
> >> 1987 - Robert M. Solow
> >> 1990 - Harry Markowitz
> >> 1990 - Merton Miller
> >> 1992 - Gary Becker
> >> 1993 - Robert Fogel
> >>
> >> Medicine:
> >> 1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
> >> 1908 - Paul Erlich
> >> 1914 - Robert Barany
> >> 1922 - Otto Meyerhof
> >> 1930 - Karl Landsteiner
> >> 1931 - Otto Warburg
> >> 1936 - Otto Loewi
> >> 1944 - Joseph Erlanger
> >> 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
> >> 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
> >> 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
> >> 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
> >> 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
> >> 1953 - Hans Krebs
> >> 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
> >> 1958 - Joshua Lederberg
> >> 1959 - Arthur Kornberg
> >> 1964 - Konrad Bloch
> >> 1965 - Francois Jacob
> >> 1965 - Andre Lwoff
> >> 1967 - George Wald
> >> 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
> >> 1969 - Salvador Luria
> >> 1970 - Julius Axelrod
> >> 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
> >> 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
> >> 1975 - Howard Martin Temin
> >> 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
> >> 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow
> >> 1978 - Daniel Nathans
> >> 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
> >> 1984 - Cesar Milstein
> >> 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
> >> 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
> >> 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
> >> 1988 - Gertrude Elion
> >> 1989 - Harold Varmus
> >> 1991 - Erwin Neher
> >> 1991 - Bert Sakmann
> >> 1993 - Richard J. Roberts
> >> 1993 - Phillip Sharp
> >> 1994 - Alfred Gilman
> >> 1995 - Edward B. Lewis
> >>
> >> Physics:
> >> 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
> >> 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
> >> 1921 - Albert Einstein
> >> 1922 - Niels Bohr
> >> 1925 - James Franck
> >> 1925 - Gustav Hertz
> >> 1943 - Gustav Stern
> >> 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
> >> 1952 - Felix Bloch
> >> 1954 - Max Born
> >> 1958 - Igor Tamm
> >> 1959 - Emilio Segre
> >> 1960 - Donald A. Glaser
> >> 1961 - Robert Hofstadter
> >> 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
> >> 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
> >> 1965 - Julian Schwinger
> >> 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
> >> 1971 - Dennis Gabor
> >> 1973 - Brian David Josephson
> >> 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
> >> 1976 - Burton Richter
> >> 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
> >> 1978 - Peter L Kapitza
> >> 1979 - Stephen Weinberg
> >> 1979 - Sheldon Glashow
> >> 1988 - Leon Lederman
> >> 1988 - Melvin Schwartz
> >> 1988 - Jack Steinberger
> >> 1990 - Jerome Friedman
> >> 1995 - Martin Perl
> >>
> >> The Jews are not demonstrating with their dead on
> the streets,
> >> yelling and chanting and asking for revenge, the
> Jews are not
> >> promoting brain washing the children in military
> training camps,
> >> teaching
> >> them
> >> how to blow themselves up and cause maximum
> deaths of Jews and other
> >> non
> >> Muslims. The Jews don't highjack planes, nor
> kill athletes at the
> >> Olympics, the Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have
> leaders calling
> >> for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.
> >> The Jews don't have the economical strength of
> the Petroleum, nor
> >> the possibilities to force the world's media to
> see "their side" of
> >> the question. Perhaps if the world's Muslims
> could invest more in
> >> normal
> >> education and less in blaming the Jews for all
> their problems, we
> >> could all live in a better world.

Salah Jafar wrote:
> The history of the word 'zero' is an informative tale.
>
> The Arabs borrowed their numerical system - which is far better adapted to arithmetic than the Roman system - from ancient India. When they did so, they named the '0' al-sifr, literally 'void'. The Arabic word was Latinised as cephirum and cifra, which in Italy was deformed to zefero, and then zero. It is the latter which passed into English and French as the name for the symbol indicating the absence of quantity or magnitude. At the same time, French borrowed the Medieval Latin word cifra, transforming it into chiffre ('number'), to designate numerical characters in general. It is from this same origin that English derived the word 'cipher', originally designating both 'nought' and '[any] Arabic numeral', before taking on its present-day meaning of 'code' (from the technique of transposing letters according to a numerical key).
>
> The history of mathematics is full of Arab inventions. The word 'algorithm', for example, comes from the name of the great mathematician Al-Khawarizmi, who is the father of algebra - another Arabic word, coming from the title of Al-Khawarizmi's work Kitab Al-Jabr (from jabara, 'to set bones'). The Arabs are also ultimately responsible for the fact that mathematicians the world over today use the letter 'x' to designate the unknown quantity - 'x' being the first letter of the Spanish word xay, which is a deformation of the Arabic shay, meaning simply 'thing'.
>
> In the golden age of Arab science, mathematical research was frequently carried out by great polymaths such as the poet Omar Khayyam, who in addition to penning his famous Quatrains also proposed solutions for equations of the third degree. But such research generally had a practical end in mind, such as calculating surface areas in order to assist in urban planning, for example.
>
> The study of astronomy was likewise encouraged with a view to practical ends, and more specifically with a view to predicting the future. On the basis of ancient Persian astrology, numerous Arab-Islamic scholars established longitudes, reformed the calendar, and went against Ptolemy's teachings by building a planetary model centred on the sun. Much later, Copernicus was in part inspired by their writings.

---

The Global Islamic population is approximately
> 1,200,000,000,
> >> or 20% of the world population.
> >> They received the following Nobel Prizes:
> >>
> >> Literature
> >> 1988 - Najib Mahfooz.
> >>
> >> Peace:
> >> 1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
> >> 1994 - Yaser Arafat
> >>
> >> Physics:
> >> 1990 - Elias James Corey
> >> 1999 - Ahmed Zewail
> >>
> >>
> >> Medicine:
> >> 1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
> >> 1998 - Ferid Mourad
> >>
> >> The Global Jewish population is aproximately
> 14,000,000 or
> >> about 0.02% of the world population.
> >> They received the following Nobel Prizes:
> >>
> >> Literature:
> >> 1910 - Paul Heyse
> >> 1927 - Henri Bergson
> >> 1958 - Boris Pasternak
> >> 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
> >> 1966 - Nelly Sachs
> >> 1976 - Saul Bellow
> >> 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
> >> 1981 - Elias Canetti
> >> 1987 - Joseph Brodsky
> >> 1991 - Nadine Gordimer World
> >>
> >> Peace:
> >> 1911 - Alfred Fried
> >> 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
> >> 1968 - Rene Cassin
> >> 1973 - Henry Kissinger
> >> 1978 - Menachem Begin
> >> 1986 - Elie Wiesel
> >> 1994 - Shimon Peres
> >> 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
> >>
> >> Chemistry:
> >> 1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
> >> 1906 - Henri Moissan
> >> 1910 - Otto Wallach
> >> 1915 - Richard Willstaetter
> >> 1918 - Fritz Haber
> >> 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
> >> 1961 - Melvin Calvin
> >> 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
> >> 1972 - William Howard Stein
> >> 1977 - Ilya Prigogine
> >> 1979 - Herbert Charle s Brown
> >> 1980 - Paul Berg
> >> 1980 - Walter Gilbert
> >> 1981 - Roald Hoffmann
> >> 1982 - Aaron Klug
> >> 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
> >> 1985 - Jerome Karle
> >> 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
> >> 1988 - Robert Huber
> >> 1989 - Sidney Altman
> >> 1992 - Rudolph Marcus
> >> 2000 - Alan J. Heeger
> >>
> >> Economics:
> >> 1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
> >> 1971 - Simon Kuznets
> >> 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
> >> 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
> >> 1976 -! Milton Friedman
> >> 1978 - Herbert A. Simon
> >> 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
> >> 1985 - Franco Modigliani
> >> 1987 - Robert M. Solow
> >> 1990 - Harry Markowitz
> >> 1990 - Merton Miller
> >> 1992 - Gary Becker
> >> 1993 - Robert Fogel
> >>
> >> Medicine:
> >> 1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
> >> 1908 - Paul Erlich
> >> 1914 - Robert Barany
> >> 1922 - Otto Meyerhof
> >> 1930 - Karl Landsteiner
> >> 1931 - Otto Warburg
> >> 1936 - Otto Loewi
> >> 1944 - Joseph Erlanger
> >> 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
> >> 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
> >> 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
> >> 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
> >> 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
> >> 1953 - Hans Krebs
> >> 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
> >> 1958 - Joshua Lederberg
> >> 1959 - Arthur Kornberg
> >> 1964 - Konrad Bloch
> >> 1965 - Francois Jacob
> >> 1965 - Andre Lwoff
> >> 1967 - George Wald
> >> 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
> >> 1969 - Salvador Luria
> >> 1970 - Julius Axelrod
> >> 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
> >> 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
> >> 1975 - Howard Martin Temin
> >> 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
> >> 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow
> >> 1978 - Daniel Nathans
> >> 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
> >> 1984 - Cesar Milstein
> >> 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
> >> 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
> >> 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
> >> 1988 - Gertrude Elion
> >> 1989 - Harold Varmus
> >> 1991 - Erwin Neher
> >> 1991 - Bert Sakmann
> >> 1993 - Richard J. Roberts
> >> 1993 - Phillip Sharp
> >> 1994 - Alfred Gilman
> >> 1995 - Edward B. Lewis
> >>
> >> Physics:
> >> 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
> >> 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
> >> 1921 - Albert Einstein
> >> 1922 - Niels Bohr
> >> 1925 - James Franck
> >> 1925 - Gustav Hertz
> >> 1943 - Gustav Stern
> >> 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
> >> 1952 - Felix Bloch
> >> 1954 - Max Born
> >> 1958 - Igor Tamm
> >> 1959 - Emilio Segre
> >> 1960 - Donald A. Glaser
> >> 1961 - Robert Hofstadter
> >> 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
> >> 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
> >> 1965 - Julian Schwinger
> >> 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
> >> 1971 - Dennis Gabor
> >> 1973 - Brian David Josephson
> >> 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
> >> 1976 - Burton Richter
> >> 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
> >> 1978 - Peter L Kapitza
> >> 1979 - Stephen Weinberg
> >> 1979 - Sheldon Glashow
> >> 1988 - Leon Lederman
> >> 1988 - Melvin Schwartz
> >> 1988 - Jack Steinberger
> >> 1990 - Jerome Friedman
> >> 1995 - Martin Perl
> >>
> >> The Jews are not demonstrating with their dead on
> the streets,
> >> yelling and chanting and asking for revenge, the
> Jews are not
> >> promoting brain washing the children in military
> training camps,
> >> teaching
> >> them
> >> how to blow themselves up and cause maximum
> deaths of Jews and other
> >> non
> >> Muslims. The Jews don't highjack planes, nor
> kill athletes at the
> >> Olympics, the Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have
> leaders calling
> >> for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.
> >> The Jews don't have the economical strength of
> the Petroleum, nor
> >> the possibilities to force the world's media to
> see "their side" of
> >> the question. Perhaps if the world's Muslims
> could invest more in
> >> normal
> >> education and less in blaming the Jews for all
> their problems, we
> >> could all live in a better world.