last night, i flipped through Anonyponymous - The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words written by John Bemelmans Marciano (http://www.amazon.com/Anonyponymous-Forgotten-People-Behind-Everyday/dp/1596916532) (most famous example is the Earl of Sandwich)
(http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51rWMM5BkdL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg)
here's one of the entries i typed up for a friend, posting here also:
al·go·rithm n. A set of rules for solving a problem.
No, the first anonyponymous person in the book is not Al Gore.
When a word begins with al-, there’s a good chance it comes from Arabic. This is true with alchemy, almanac, alcove, alcohol (ironically), and algorithm, named for Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, or, as his Latin translators called him, Algorismus.
In the early ninth century Baghdad was fast becoming the world’s most important center of trade and learning, and while engaged at its illustrious House of Wisdom, al-Khwarizmi produced his most famous work, The Book of Restoring and Balancing. In it, al- Khwarizmi explained how to solve complex mathematical equations by a method called al-jabr, Arabic for “reunion of broken parts,” which came rendered in Latin as “algebra.” (See about those al- words?) On an even more basic level, al-Khwarizmi was instrumental in the spread of Arabic numerals. Not that he invented them, nor did anyArab; the symbols originated on the Indian subcontinent in the centuries leading up to Christ.
The set of rules laid down by al-Khwarizmi for working with these fancy Hindu number signs was so revolutionary that his name came to mean arithmetic, first in the Arab world, and then in the form algorism throughout the West. But this wouldn’t happen until al-Khwarizmi’s books were finally translated into Latin, about three hundred years after he wrote them, an indication of just how far the Christian world lagged behind the Muslim one during the intellectual deep freeze of the Middle Ages. Roman numerals—a system invented for notching sticks—didn’t get replaced by Hindu-Arabic ones until the mid-1500s.