Terry Moore : Why is ‘x’ the unknown
Most of people already known the letter ‘x’ is represent something that unknown. In math, ‘x’ is to tell that a variable is unknown. Also it letter everywhere in the culture, for examples : x-files, project-x, TEDx.
Why is the letter ‘x’ represent unknow ?
About six years ago, Terry decided to learn Arabic, a supremely logical language. He said that when write Arabic language is like crafting an equation, because every part is extremely precise and contain a lot of information. May be this is why everything we know as science, mathematics have its derivations in Arabic language system, most notably, Al-Jabra (Algebra).
The Arabic text containing mathematical wisdom finally made the way to Europe, which is to say Spain, in the 11th and 12th century. There was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a European language.
The unknown in Arabic is called syaiun, which means something, some undefined thing. But the problem is, the word syaiun cannot spelled in the Spanish, because Spanish haven’t ‘sy’ sound. So they borrowed the C-K sound from the classical Greek, and later it was replaced from Greek with the Latin X. And then it formed for math textbooks for almost 600 years. So, now we have the answer why the letter ‘x’ is the unknown ? because we can’t say ‘sy’ in Spanish.
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