It's true that zero -- and the place-value system -- came from India, but it's not true that all of the mathematics of the Abbasid Caliphate was simply borrowed

It's true that zero -- and the place-value system -- came from India, but it's not true that all of the mathematics of the Abbasid Caliphate was simply borrowed Hindu math. Al-Khwarizmi, whose book introduced Hindu qua "Arabic" numerals to the West, generally built on Greek and Indian contributions and therefrom invented al-jabr, a distinctly Arabic word now pronounced "algebra". >It is true that in two respects the work of al-Khowarizmi represented a retrogression from that of Diophantus. First, it is on a far more elementary level than that found in the Diophantine problems and, second, the algebra of al-Khowarizmi is thoroughly rhetorical, with none of the syncopation found in the Greek Arithmetica or in Brahmagupta's work. Even numbers were written out in words rather than symbols! It is quite unlikely that al-Khwarizmi knew of the work of Diophantus, but he must have been familiar with at least the astronomical and computational portions of Brahmagupta; yet neither al-Khwarizmi nor other Arabic scholars made use of syncopation or of negative numbers. Nevertheless, the Al-jabr comes closer to the elementary algebra of today than the works of either Diophantus or Brahmagupta, because the book is not concerned with difficult problems in indeterminant analysis but with a straight forward and elementary exposition of the solution of equations, especially that of second degree. The Arabs in general loved a good clear argument from premise to conclusion, as well as systematic organization – respects in which neither Diophantus nor the Hindus excelled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi#Contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi...