Some Mathematical Etymology

Yes, mathematical words have ancestors too:

GEOMETRY, GEODESIC - from Greek: ge = earth, metreo = to measure; suggesting that geometry may have begun with problems about land distribution, reclamation and inheritance.
Compare GEOGRAPHY, GEOLOGY, GEODESY, from Greek: graphos = writing, geodes = earthy.

CALCULUS - from Latin: calculus = pebble, calculare = to count; suggesting that pebbles were used for tallying and counting long ago in Italy.

DIGIT - from Latin: digitus = finger; suggesting that fingers have long been used for counting, and that finger signs were once used for the Roman numerals I, V, X, etc.

ALGEBRA - In 766 AD the Caliph al-Mansur founded his new capital at Baghdad, which soon became a great commercial and intellectual centre. Al-Khwarizmi was one of the first scholars to work at the new House of Wisdom in Baghdad - a kind of research institute whose major activity (luckily for us in the future) was collecting and translating the classical Greek mathematical and scientific texts rescued from the persecution and destruction of the Academy at Athens and the Library at Alexandria.

Al-K wrote (about the year 825) one of the earliest Islamic texts on solving equations for unknowns; it was called in Arabic: Al-kitab al muhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa-l-muqabala = The Condensed Book on the Calculation of al-Jabr and al-Muqabala, where al-Jabr = restoring (referring to the operation of taking a negative quantity from one side of an equation to the become a positive quantity on the other side), and al-Muqabala = comparing. The work was (for obvious reasons) given a shorthand name - the al-Jabr, or Algebra!

ALGORITHM - A Latin translation of one of al-K's books on arithmetic begins with the words Dixit Algorismi = Al-K says....Because of this, curiously, his name later gave us the word we use for various routine operations with numbers!

ZERO - The Hindu word, sunya = empty, was used for the Hindu invention of the symbol for `nothing' in their decimal place-value system about 1300 years ago. When the Arabs adopted the Hindu numeral system they described the symbol by the Arabic: sifr = empty. When, around the 12th and 13th centuries, the Europeans adopted this Hindu-Arabic system, they Latinized the word to zephirum, and then it was eventually shortened (by practical businesspersons probably) to zero.

CIPHER - from Arabic: sifr = empty, as above, because `a mere cipher' means a virtual nothing! This is similar to the origin of the name Abel in the early chapters of the Bible; it comes from the Hebrew word: Hebel = vanity, or a puff of vapour. This is the word used in the famous declaration of Ecclesiastes: `Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!' And the point of the deep symbolism in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel is that Cain, in murdering his brother, treated him as a mere cipher, a mere nothing, to be got out of his way... (By the way, `Cain' derives from the Hebrew word for spear!)

[More surprising mathematical etymology next issue! Did you know that there is a connection between the words ANGLE and ENGLAND? POLYGON and GENOCIDE?! It all hinges on the Latin word for corner and the Greek word for knee....]