The birth of algebra, conclusion

There is little doubt about the concurrent arrival of the new Arabic alphabet and the Hindu numerals in the new and spirited cultural milieu of Baghdad, early in the 9th century. The connection between this concurrence and the birth of algebra in the same time and place, a triple concurrence, as an explosive chemical reaction is plausable perhaps, yet not conclusive. One objection immediately comes to mind: why did we not have this explosion in India, where the liberation of the Devanagari syllabary from numerical burden came a century of two earlier?

My understanding of this involves the idea of the numerical layer as a sort of electrochemical insulator or barrier between the phonemic and the spritual layers. With the melting or dissolving of the barrier, the spritual significance of the characters came into catalytic interaction with the alphabet, and the abstraction fo the divine attributes of the spiritual layer flowed into the space vacated by the numerical layer of signification, elevating it into an abstact, or algebraic, significance. And the spiritual layer was much stronger in medieval Islamic and Jewish culture than in India. Well, think it over.

Revised and Copyright 07 August 1998 by Ralph H. Abraham