Finding God in The Numeral?

…and He has enumerated everything in numbers.

QUR’AN (Al-Jinn 72:28)

I was reading Lost History in the subway: When I read this verse, I was awestruck... "Why haven't I heard of this verse before?" I wondered, what is the context of the verse? What precedes this fragmented verse? Is He talking about the universe?

He alone knows the Unseen, nor does He make any one acquainted with His Mysteries. Except a messenger whom He has chosen: and then He makes a band of watchers march before him and behind him. So that He may know that they have truly delivered the messages of their Lord, and He encompasses what is with them and He records the number of all things.

QUR’AN (Al-Jinn 72: 26-28)

I thought about writing a 'review' of Michael Hamilton Morgan's Lost History once I finish it, but now I can't wait... Maybe I will eventually do it, but the story of al-Khawarizmi is just mind-blowing. Here is an except from the book. Someone actually rewrote it on his blog, looks like I'm not the only one awestruck by this chapter (I just copy-paste and cut out unimportant parts):-

A pivotal force in creating these numbers and formulas is a Persian man born in about 780 in the faraway town of Khiva, Khorasan province, known as Khwarizm to the Arabs, in Central Asia. He is named Mohammad al-Khwarizmi, literally Mohammad of Khwarizm.

In the eighth century, his birthplace is deep in the steppe, a way station on the Silk Road that stretches at one end from China, at the other end from Rome. Though the two ends of this spectrum have never had a direct contact, over the centuries there is a fairly regular exchange between two worlds. All this passes through Khorasan; at times the exchange is no more than a breeze, a foreign and exotic lost butterfly hanging in the air for a few seconds, then swept away.

This dark-haired main, with piercing brown eyes set into deep sockets and cheeks creased by leanness and weather, is a magician in other ways as well. Steeped in the tradition of faith and of magic, he yearns to find the secrets of the universe in numbers. He writes mathematical problems; he dreams numbers; he reduces every movement of his day to numbers: the numbers of steps to the bathhouse, the angle of sun to Earth and the triangle created there, and the curves of the Silk Road wandering across half the Earth.

In numbers and equations and computations spinning out of their series, he sense the hidden codes of the universe, the numerical representation of the complexity of God’s creation. And as a Muslim, in a time when it is believed that God can be revealed through reason and knowledge, he will help lead a great mathematical revolution, giving the first glimpse of a future day when the age of computers will outstrip the processing speeds and capabilities of the human mind, no matter how brilliant.

At the founding of the House of Wisdom in 832 in Baghdad, al-Khwarizmi is summoned by the Caliph al-Mamun himself to assist in the search for God in the numeral. And when he arrives there, he sees the great interpreters like Hunayun ibn Ishaq gradually decoding the formulas of Euclid’s Elements based on geometry, of Pythagoras and Ptolemy, and thoughts of Aristotle and Socrates. Others are translating Archimedes’s works such as The Sphere and the Cylinder, The Measurement of the Circle, The Equilibrium of Planes, and Floating bodies, all of which help influence Muslim thought significantly. Al-Khwarizmi will help in that effort, because he is able to read Greek and turn its meaning into Arabic.

The Central Asian man sees turbaned mathematician-astronomers working together in rooms using maps, star charts, astrotables, and other measuring instruments, thinking through problems together, checking each other’s work, poring over translations, and discussing endlessly. For a man who has often done much of his work alone and had rarely found thinkers who were his equal, to find so much intelligence and competition gathered in one place is both exhilarating and intimidating. But he knows ths is an unparalleled opportunity, and he will make as much of it as he can.

Weak and drunk with the world that is now exploding in his head, al-Khwarizmi knows that mathematics has to be the code work of the divine. From the discovery of the Hindu dot that will one day be represented in much of the world by a circle and known a zero, he sees an infinite number of paths and possibilities streaking out in all directions. And he is not alone in these kinds of thoughts, for in the house of wisdom and other mathematical salons that will arise at other courts, dozens and eventually hundreds astronomical-mathematical thinkers are turning over in their minds assorted issues, each coming at the numeric mystery from a slightly different angle. Unconsciously and intuitively, the early Muslim mathematicians will create a kind of collective intelligence, feeding on each other, borrowing and stealing from one another, competing for the favors of patrons, making terrible mistakes, authoring spectacular breakthroughs. In a way, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and similar Muslim centers will be the world’s first think tanks, an example of network computing, using networked human brains rather than machines.

And al-Khwarizmi and his colleagues are not alone in time or history, for aside from inventing, they also assimilate and aggregate much of the brilliance that has come before. From the Babylonians via the Greeks, they inherit the sexagesimal measure of time in 60 seconds and 60 minutes. Muslim astronomers and other scientists will translate these numerals into the degrees of the compass and the directions of earth and sky that will survive into the 21^st century. From the Indians they will capture the astronomic importance of numbers. Via the Persians and directly from the Indians, they will capture the zero, and the breakthrough of decimal math, and the first hints at representing numbers as symbols and not as words.

Among other things, al-Khwarizmi realizes as he scribbles that the very process of writing mathematics will need to be revised. In his day there are three different methods of calculating math in the Abbasid world and its environs. There is the universal finger counting method, which serves certain basic purposes well, as in business transactions of small size. There is a more complicated version using Arabic letter characters, which is better but still not up to the task.

And there is the Hindu method, a decimal system with characters representing quantities ranging from 0 to 9, and then arranged in a combination to reach up and down into positive and negative infinity from the sources dot of zero. The Hindu numerals are the best, the only ones adequate to all the possibilities that al-Khwarizmi and his counterparts and successors see dancing in their heads: needs like calculating the area of irregular spaces; finding missing quantities using the relationship of known ones; calculating the relationship of the Earth to the sun and stars, so as to better compute the holy days as commanded by the Prophet; finding the location of Mecca so that the faithful can pray in that direction with certainly and not guesswork. The Hindu cum Muslim number system will be essential to establishing a new theory about curvature that will show how to resolve the two different universes of angles and curves. The new number system will begin to help answer the mathematical questions implicit in conical space and projections. And the Hindu-Arab numbers will be essential to 21^st century questions such as the behavior of light and the properties of solids. Modern technology and civilization will not able to rise and evolve without these numbers.

In al-Khwarizmi’s mind and in the Hindu system, all spins around the dot of nothingness. Brilliant Bhramagupta had found the zero and tried to represent its emptiness and mystery in a written equation. He wrote the ultimate truth of zero to be: Zero divided by zero equals zero. And though he was wrong in that calculation, which is impossible, he was infinitely prescient in his willingness to think in new ways, which in turn threw a spark of genius to the Muslims, starting a bonfire of thought.

Two hundred years later up on that Baghdad roof, al-Khwarizmi laughs to himself. The equation of division of and by zero is absurd; it proves nothing. He laughs out loud, risking waking the others. A woman of the night calls up to him, unaccustomed to hearing laughter from this handsome, dark man and wondering if he wants company. But he is off in his thoughts.

The zero, he realizes, must be accepted on pure faith. It cannot be proven. And in terrible irony, which he considers sharing with his patron al-Mamun, he sees that the ultimate value of rationalist mathematics is pure revelation, just as god was revealed not quantified.

Pp 82-90, Lost History, Michael Hamilton Morgan.

P.S. Al-Khawarizmi is the very guy who laid down the foundation of algebra (al-jabr wa al-muqabala) and makes me scratch my head staring at abstract mathematical proves and computer science algorithm. I don't know whether I should thank him for that, but I so wanna go to Khurasan!