Music & Math & DNA of Culture

Here’s a good name for a Techno band: the Algo Rhythms. The band’s got a Latin feel to it, you say? Even better: Los Algoritmos. That’s a real word BTW, just like algorithm, a formula for calculation. It’s even divisible into two words, with meanings of their own in Spanish: ‘algo’ (something) and ‘ritmo’ (rhythm), in other words, Sump’n Thump’n, not a bad name for a band either.

FYI algorithm is a word taken from the name al-Khwarismi, after the great Persian mathematician, not to be confused with ‘algebra’, from the Arabic ‘al-Jabr’, ‘restoration’, also a specialty of the same man, though the roots of both go back to the Greeks.

Did you know that almost all words in English that begin in ‘al’ (except for ‘almost’) come from Arabic, and many in Spanish, too (though many lose their beginning ‘al’ depending on the origin, like English ‘cotton/algodon’ Spanish)? Thank God for the excellent Muslim mathematicians who carried on the Greek traditions and provide a direct link to today’s computers…

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