“The most influential medium of transmission turned out to be a textbook, written in Arabic in the ninth century by a man who lived in Baghdad. Al Khwarizmi laid out the basic methods for adding, multiplying, and dividing numbers—even extracting square roots and calculating digits of π. These procedures were precise, unambiguous, mechanical, efficient, correct—in short, they were algorithms, a term coined to honor the wise man after the decimal system was finally adopted in Europe, many centuries later.”