Why is x the unknown Terry Moore

I have the answer to a question that

we’ve all asked the question is why is

it that the letter X represents the

unknown now I know we learned that in

math class but now it’s everywhere in

the culture the X PRIZE the X Files

Project X TEDx where’d that come from

about six years ago I decided that I

would learn Arabic which turns out to be

a supremely logical language to write a

word or a phrase or a sentence in Arabic

is like crafting an equation because

every part is extremely precise and

carries a lot of information that’s one

of the reasons so much of what we’ve

come to think of as Western science and

mathematics and engineering was really

worked out in the first few centuries of

the Common Era by the Persians and the

Arabs and the Turks this includes the

little system in Arabic called algebra

and algebra roughly translates to the

system for reconciling disparate parts

algebra finally came into English as

Algebra one example among many the

Arabic texts containing this

mathematical wisdom finally made their

way to Europe which is to say Spain in

the 11th and 12th century and when they

arrived there was tremendous interest in

translating this wisdom into a European

language but there were problems one

problem is there there are some sounds

in Arabic that just don’t make it

through a European voice box without

lots of practice trust me on that one

also those very sounds tend not to be

represented by the characters that are

available in European languages here’s

one of the culprits

this is the letter Xin and it makes the

sound we think of as SH it’s also the

very first letter of the word

shailen which means something just like

the English word something some

undefined

unknown thing now in Arabic we can make

this definite by adding the definite

article al so this is Al Shaitan the

unknown thing and this is a word that

appears throughout early mathematics

such as this 10th century derivation of

proofs the problem for the medieval

Spanish scholars who were tasked with

translating this material is that the

letter Sheen and the word Shaitaan can’t

be rendered into Spanish because Spanish

doesn’t have that Sh that sound so by

convention that they created a rule in

which they borrowed the CK sound of the

sound from the classical Greek in the

form of the letter Chi later when this

material was translated into a common

European language which is to say Latin

they simply replaced the Greek Chi 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 but 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 I

thought that was worth sharing