Unleash Savant Skills: MASTER Algebra with Jolene Moon

Algebraic inputs and outputs have a huge role to play in scientific research and in modern artificial intelligence through algorithms they don’t have to be this abstract complicated concept you can work on your algebraic understanding simply by engaging with problemsolving critical thinking skills and if you think that algebra is all about X’s y’s

And ABCs you may not be aware of how algebra has a story connected with the story of Humanity’s history or why it’s so important even the origin of the words algebra and algorith them have an origin that might surprise you they both come from the name of the Titan in the

Thumbnail maybe you know him maybe you don’t he’s called mahabad ibin Musa alisi and he is the so-called father of algebra the discipline of algebra that this ancient Sant developed takes your skills of understanding and relating quantities to one another to the next level and applies that logic to any

Problem governed by the same rational principles it is incredibly powerful and if you don’t know what I mean by that we’re we’re going to interrupt this regularly scheduled maths video to jump over to history and economics and consider the Curious Case of Henry Ford but before we do that folks welcome

Back to gcsc Minecraft and chill my Series where I play Minecraft while I entertain myself and maybe you with the stories behind the science and maths that you need to revise that fascinates me I hope you’re having a relaxing day and that you’ve got a cozy warm or

Refreshing cold drink and something to do while I chat and build I’m just going to be here decorating my house and my roof uh while we learn about some algebra and don’t worry there’s no equations in this video just some food for thought and a story of two seemingly

Unconnected old dudes from history so let’s get into it and first talk about Ford Henry Ford is a fascinating historical figure I first learned about Ford at school during my history GCC when studying modern American history I recognized the the brand name Ford from the Cars right and learned and

Recognized that something about his factory production line was important to the American or global economy or something but didn’t learn more about him beyond that or appreciate what a massive figure of the early 20th century he was and the devastating Legacy that he has left behind so do not mistake my

Inflation of his impact on the world for respect and I really don’t want to spend any longer than necessary on this historical figure known for his vicious anti-Semitism and delusional hatred and hypocrisy uh for example he made massive technical contributions to both sides of World War I and two with his Vehicles

Despite being vehemently against war and those that profit off of it in particular and then turned around and exploited French prisoners of War for enslave labor what and he did this well at the same time having the goal to be anti-union because he believed in the right of the working class to have

Leisure Time higher wages and more economic power which is good but because that led to higher productivity and he believed that union leaders themselves profited off of economic crisis that affected the working class bit of a complicated opinion there but clearly the working class that he represented only included

A certain group of individuals and not the every man that he claimed to represent so to be clear we don’t like Mr Ford and when I say that something is fascinating to me you have to understand that that does not necessarily mean in a positive or flattering light I’m not

Talking about what this guy did or believed because I like him and if you think that his philosophies and his impact in the in in the early 20th century sound familiar almost like another very famous historical figure of the 20th century you’d be correct he was very well-liked by the infamous cult

Leader of genocidal Germany in the 1930s and 40s and they shared values and beliefs and we can acknowledge the impact and complicated legacies of influential historic IAL figures like this without ascribing any moral value to our interest in understanding them provided that we are intentionally engaging with the information and

Reflecting on our interest in these figures critically so for me challenging cultural norms and narratives around reved historical figures like this whose positive achievements and impacts often outshine the more balanced view of their legacy is something I actually care about particularly when the figures are associated with my fields of expertise

The context surrounding why and how these individuals had power what they chose to do with it is crucial for critical thinking and learning how not to repeat their mistakes right you you just sometimes have to have a very strong stomach to read about most in fact of the the powerful and impactful

Figures in history um mostly they are all terrible so actually while while RIT here’s a tangent for you I’ve got no interest in knowing or judging whether an individual from the past was good or evil especially if I’m only assigning the value of me reading and learning

About them based on that judgment but also because good and evil is is one of those pernicious false binaries of the world that serves to hoard power and resources to whichever group societ is able to successfully convince everyone is good right and then therefore justify stealing from or committing violence

Against whoever we deem evil and it’s only a hop skip and jump forward duped by the proper genda and our beliefs are aligned with the genocidal values of the likes of Ford Hitler and Netanyahu for example so I I I think good and evil is one of the worst binaries that exists in

The world that we all need to deconstruct and and unlearn but you might think well you just described some really awful beliefs surely you think that Ford and others like him are evil and to that I say I don’t think that people can be fundamentally evil only incredibly harm

Ful and possibly misguided and shaped by the beliefs of the world around them and what it promotes normalizes and rewards and that’s actually why I think it matters that we don’t use these false binaries and and binary language like that when it comes to people um we can

Use it to describe Acts or impacts or or whatever but not people um but that’s a topic for another video um tangent over why am I talking about war and the economy in the 20 in the 20 century and Henry Ford and what his beliefs were so

Let’s get back to maths with all those disclaimers in philosophical musings about gal out the way so Ford’s notable achievement that often whitewashes his abhorent belief system and behaviors is his novel development of the production line like I mentioned Ford was known as a child for having an insatiable

Curiosity for how mechanical things like watches and eventually engines worked he liked to take them apart and put them back together and he liked efficiency very relatable uh for a scientist out of this and because of the algebraic thinking that he applied to the steps components and processes involved in the

Construction of engines and cars the Ford production line was created and I want you to understand this because Ford could not have conceived of this production line system which had massive impacts in the in the 20th century in the world we live in now and the world

Wars if he had not both understood the steps of the man mechanical construction and thought about them in an abstract way that allowed for generalization of each step into a sequence of repeating parts that could be done by one pair of hands on one part at a time right this

Is a world changing shakeup in how modern Factory lines work and it made cars financially accessible to the the general public the mass population and think about how that process has been applied since to almost every mass-produced items that we purchase use or consume this was such a a big deal

Um and I I can’t emphasize that enough because think about for a sec about what I just said right he generalized each step into a sequence of parts that could be tackled one at a time and then remember that the topic of this video is algebra and

Algorithms does that not sound like an algorithm to Ford basically reinvented what Muhammad iben Musa alisi did in the 9th century and applied it to the process of building engines cars planes and whatever he made the construction process an algorithm that individual workers could follow and now in modern

Times robots can follow right because of his deep understanding of the exact steps involved and how they all connected and and made the most efficient production line This is logical leral thinking and Abstract algebraic conceptualization married together that aloris applied to solving equations polinomial like quadratics and

And and other common math problems of his time and what that did is develop an incredible toolkit for algorithmically solving almost any problem just like how Ford applied this tool in his thinking for solving the problem of how inaccessible and expensive cars were to produce for the average

American so finally we connected the two men and I’m now going to Pivot and talk about Al hor ismi a little bit so he lived between uh 780 and 850 ad so quite a long time ago and was a polymath who worked in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad

And he sought to of being Persian originating in that area of Greater Iran which we now call roughly usbekistan and turkistan and I’ve linked an article below for more info and and all of those details about this guy because he is so cool Not only was he a mathematician he

Was an astronomer a geographer a scientist a linguist and an astrologer right there is so much cool stuff to learn about him I highly recommend you go have a read and and yet we hardly ever talk about him at school yet how many times do you do we talk about Ford

Or Newton or Edison you know like what about this guy he wrote the key manuscripts that made algebra are universally applicable in ways that people like Ford and scientists and mathematicians are using today as well as programmers like I said working on algorithms for research

Robotics and Ai and in fact like I said at the very beginning the word algorithm comes from the latinization and then eventually anglicized version of the Latin for Al’s name aloris algorithm right he did not invent algebra or even numeric system that we use today but what he did was translated it and

Developed it like many Islamic scholars at the time were doing this during the time period known as the Golden Age of Islam they did so much hard work translating Knowledge from even more ancient Scholars Babylonian Hindu and Greek Scholars and their work allowed eventually that to be translated into

Latin and Greek and and that work passed through into Europe and I say pass through was taken into Europe by European scholars and contributed to developing the systems of maths and science as we know them in the global North today and so what he did was added his perspective to the earlier

Works like Ford he developed the system that already existed into an applicable real life problem solving tool for problems that people had at the time his techniques his notation and his work on things like the number zero for example which I talked about um last week or the

Week before as well as balancing equations this revolutionized mathematics advancing it from just simple arithmetic or calculations and it took it to the next level all because he had this excellent algebraic thinking he turned what would have been really complicated problems for the arithmetic methods of the time think stuff like

Abacuses and Counting systems he turned these problems into easily solved equations that relied on the abstracted concept and he used words and diagrams to solve and balance problems and we use those exact Concepts today so what we call simplifying expressions he called reduction moving a negative quantity

From one side to the other and then changing its sign he called that completion and subtracting a quantity from both sides he called that balancing these are all techniques you learn in your first algebra class yet I bet you had no idea that they were 1,200 years

Old right how cool is that our where is me’s work was so powerful because not only did he provide novel techniques for solving complex polom and other real life specific problems uh like I mentioned um he solved problems around inheritance dividing up land trade surveying problems all sorts into abstractly conceptualized algebraic

Problems where you have the same set of steps that you can follow each time no matter what the specific numbers were and that meant that he was Prov providing people with a framework that they could use themselves for solving what writers Rasheed and Armstrong I’ve linked them Below have a look they

Called this an infinite class of problems he truly was a Sant this was an incredible development and he is also the reason that we use the technique completing the square if you’ve revised that yet to solve quadratic equations and he’s also develop accredited with developing the latis multiplication

Method for big numbers uh which Fibonacci then brought into Europe um which you’ve already hopefully seen my short videos on on that slightly different it’s a modification um anyway other incredible achievements of his he made an incredibly accurate map of the Nile North Asia Europe North Africa he

Produced accurate sign and cosign tables he produced the first ever table of tangents he figured out how to find the coordinates of the Sun and Moon using the Hebrew calendar and he wrote two books on using and constructing astrolabes and if you don’t know what an

Astrolab is I’ll Chuck up some images on the screen here so you can see um just think the big golden brassy spherical turning things that look like a cross between a a globe and a Sun Dial and some kind of grand device that you see in every steampunk or fantasy setting

Whenever you walk into like a Wizard’s Tower it’s you know one of those things um and they spin and turn and look cool um he also wrote political histories where included horoscopes for significant people and that’s quite fun I find that quite funny I love astrology myself and I enjoy reading how many

Famous ancient Scholars included it in their skill set like totally legit with all their other skills um that that tickles me and if that doesn’t give away what star sign I am um leave your thoughts in the comments below if any astrologers are listening anyway back to the point Al qu sm’s

Development of problem solving used the same repeated set of steps regardless of the numerical aspects and that’s what led us to being able to program computers to solve equations for us right and algorithms that we all interact with every day imagine if instead of solving issues of inheritance

Or what the specific coordinates of Mecca are if alisi the father of algebra knew that his work was determining what videos we watch every day what news we hear what products we’re Buy and what trends are capturing popular imagination I wonder if he knew if he could foresee

The power of the problem solving system that he translated and developed like that would surely blow his mind or like maybe maybe he knew maybe he could tell how powerful what he was doing was I don’t know but um anyway hopefully that inspires you to think a little more

Abstractly and in steps when you’re tackling your algebra problems that’s really the key when you consider what the components are that you’re following the same set of instructions every time if you can turn every single math problem you’re solving into an algorithm and then you recognize the

Clues and exam questions and this is what I was talking about in my very first video you’ve got to know the steps if you can see the clues that trigger a certain algorithm you’re going to get all the marks because then it’s just chucking numbers in right and also I

Hope today’s video has helped you consider what and who stories are told about technological scientific and intellectual advancements particularly in the 20th century but that’s more than enough uh politics and history for today so if this interested you all the links to the sources and everything I talked

About is below um YouTube is also full of videos about algebra algorithms and ancient mathematicians and their stories so if you want to know more have have a Google of any of those things I saw Maybe I’ll link that below as well a great video about algorithms recently um

How they work and what they are and stuff um for now I’m just going to leave you with a reminder that your words are spells so be kind to yourself have a lovely rest of your day uh this week’s physics and chemistry videos are being uploaded really soon in the usual place

Uh linked below thank you for being patient with me this week while I had a down week um the stuff happening in the world and my life were getting on top of me and I just needed a break over the weekend um but that’ll do for now see you next time yell bye