Terry
Moore
The letter X not only
learned in math class, but also learned everywhere in the culture. The X prize,
the X files, project X, TED X, where that come from? And terry will answer the
question about Why is it that the letter X represents the unknown.
Six years ago Terry
learned Arabic. On his opinion, Arabic
is a supremely logical language, because every part is extremely precise and
carries a lot of information. That’s why western science and mathematics and engineering
was really common by the Persians and the Arabs and the
Turks.
This little system in
Arabic called al jabra. Al jabra came into English as algebra. The Arabic texts
finally made their way to Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. one problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just don't make it through a
European voice box without lots of practice. Also, those very
sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are
available in European languages.
Here's one of the culprits. This is
the letter SHeen, and it makes the sound we think of as SH
"sh." It's also the very first letter of the word
shailan, which means "something" just like the the English word "something"
some undefined, unknown thing.
In Arabic, by adding article “al” so this
is al shailan. This is a word that appears throughout early
mathematics, such as this 10th century derivation of proofs.
The problem for the
Medieval Spanish scholars is that the letter SHeen and the word
shalan can't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn't have
that SH, that "sh" sound. So by convention, they
borrowed the CK sound, "ck" sound, from the classical
Greek in the form of the letter Kai.
Later when this material was
translated into Latin European language, they simply replaced the Greek
Kai with the Latin X. And once this material was in Latin, it formed
the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years.
But now we have the answer to our question. X is the
unknown because you can't say "sh" in Spanish.
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