ABSTRACT
As described in Chapter 5, the word algorithm comes from the name of an Arabic mathematician, al-Khawarizmi, who wrote his famous book, Rules of Restoration and Reduction, in the ninth century. According to the book by Donald E. Knuth (1938-) [1], the original meaning of the word algorithm is “the process of doing arithmetic using Arabic numerals.” Knuth also mentioned in the same book that the word algorithm did not appear in Webster’s New World Dictionary as late as 1957. Let us look up the word in some old versions of English dictionaries. The Concise Oxford Dictionary in 1964 defines the word algorithm as Arabic decimal notation. The same dictionary in 1976 defines the word algorithm as the process or rules for calculation, almost the same definition used today by the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
