The word algebra comes from the Arabic: الجبر, romanized: al-jabr, lit.'reunion of broken parts, bonesetting ' from the title of the early 9th century book ʿIlm al-jabr wa l-muqābala 'The Science of Restoring and Balancing' by the Persian mathematician and astronomer al-Khwarizmi.

The word algebra comes from the title of a book by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

A mathematician specialized in algebra is called an algebraist. Sometimes, the same phrase is used for a subarea and its main algebraic structures for example, Boolean algebra and a Boolean algebra. The word algebra is not only used for naming an area of mathematics and some subareas it is also used for naming some sorts of algebraic structures, such as an algebra over a field, commonly called an algebra. There are many areas of mathematics that belong to algebra, some having 'algebra' in their name, such as commutative algebra, and some not, such as Galois theory. Linear algebra, which deals with linear equations and linear mappings, is used for modern presentations of geometry, and has many practical applications (in weather forecasting, for example).

Abstract algebra is the name given, mostly in education, to the study of algebraic structures such as groups, rings, and fields. Įlementary algebra deals with the manipulation of variables (commonly represented by Roman letters) as if they were numbers and is therefore essential in all applications of mathematics. The quadratic formula expresses the solution of the equation ax 2 + bx + c = 0, where a is not zero, in terms of its coefficients a, b and c.Īlgebra (from Arabic ‏ الجبر‎ ( al-jabr) 'reunion of broken parts, bonesetting' ) is the study of variables and the rules for manipulating these variables in formulas it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics.

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