TED SUMMARY Terry Moore: hy is ‘x’ the unknown?

In this vidio Terry Moore reveals that he has an answer to the all questions asked of us. The question is, Why does the letter X represent the unknown? Like in math class, but now, it's everywhere - The X prize, The X-Files, Project X, TEDx. Where does it come from?

About six years Terry decided to study Arabic, which turned out to be a very logical language. Writing a word or phrase or sentence in Arabic is like assembling an equation, because each part is very precise and brings a lot of information. That is one of the reasons many of us come to the conclusion that science, mathematics, and engineering in the West today have actually been used in the first centuries by Persians, Arabs, and Turks.

Includes a small system in Arabic called al-jebr. And al-jebr is roughly translated to "System to match different sections." Al-jebr finally came to England as an algebra. One of the many other things.

The Arabic text containing the wisdom of mathematics finally reached Europe, Spain, in the 11th and 12th centuries. And when the text came there was an extraordinary interest to translate this Arabic into European.

But there is a problem. One of them has some voices in Arabic that are difficult to pronounce by Europeans without much practice. Trust me for this one. And also the pronunciation tends not to be represented by the letters available in the European language.

Here is one example. This is the letter Shin, which reads as we think of as SH, "sh." This is also the first letter of the shalan word, which means "something" as in the English word "something", undefined, unknown.

In Arabic, we can make it undefined by adding "al." This is al-shalan, the unknown. This is a word that emerged in the first period of mathematics becoming known, such as evidence of decline in the 10th century.

The problem for medieval Spanish scholars who are in charge of translating this material is the Sheen and the shalan word cannot be changed to Spanish because the Spanish does not have the SH, which sounds "sh". So by convention, they create a rule in which they borrow CK sounds, a "ck" sound, from classical Greek in the form of Chi letters

Then, when this material is translated into a common European language, say Latin, they simply replace the Greek Chi with X Latin. And once that happens, once this material has been converted to Latin, it forms the basis of a mathematical textbook for nearly 600 years.

So now we have an answer to this question. Why X becomes the unknown? X being unknown because you can not say "sh" in Spanish.