WHY IS “X” THE UNKNOWN

By Terry Moore In this chance, I would like to summarized a video by Terry Moore. He talks about why is x the unknown for 03.53 minutes. By watching this video, perhaps our curiosity will be have the answer. As we have known that x is always unknown. When we unknown about something, it indicates that we know nothing about something. Therefore we always write or say x. At the beginning of his speech, he directly say that he has the answer about our question why the letter x always represents the unknown. He told about kinds of x, which are the X prize, the X files, project X, TEDx. So, where the “x” come from? For further explanation about a mystery letter, x, stay read this summary till the end because he will reveal a mystery about “x” and enjoy it. Start when he decided to learn Arabic about six years ago, which turns out to be a supremely logical language. This language like crafting an equation when we want to write a word or a phrase or a sentence because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. That is one of the reasons so much of what we have come to think of as Western science, mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first centuries of the Common Era by the Persians, the Arabs and the Turks. This includes the little system in Arabic called al-jebra. For al-jebr itself translates to the system for reconciling disparate parts. When al-jebr came into English, it becomes algebra. Then, the history continued when the Arabic text made their way to Europe. The European country where the Arabic arrived was Spain in the 11th and 12th centuries. When they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a European language. However, there were problems. One problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just do not 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. He also gave the example of a letter in Arabic. It is “sheen” which make sound as “sh”. It is also the very first letter of the word “shalan”, which means something, just like in the English word something, some undefined, unknown thing. Then, we can make this definite by adding the definite article “a.” so, al-ashlan means the unknown thing and it appears throughout early mathematics, such as this 10th century derivation of proofs. The next problem he explained was for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter “sheen” and the word “shalan” can not be rendered into Spanish because does not have that “sh” sound. So, by convention, they created rule in which 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 a common European language, which is to say Latin, they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X. And once that happened, once this material was in Latin,it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years. So now, we have the answer to our question. Why is it that X is the unknown? X is the unknown because you can't say "sh" in Spanish and he thought that was worth sharing.