Relating to or denoting an early form of algebra using symbolic notation instead of words, used in medieval mathematics.
From Arabic al-jabr or possibly from Italian cosa meaning 'thing.' Used in the 16th-17th centuries to describe algebraic methods that represented unknown quantities as 'things' or symbols.
When algebra was new to Europe, mathematicians called unknowns 'cossic quantities'—and this Arabic-origin word shows how the very foundations of modern math came through the Islamic world and Italy.
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