of supporters on wednesday at least one thousand people have been killed in antigovernment protests over the rising price of food. u.s. president donald trump has walked out of a meeting with the democrats after they again refused to fund a border war with mexico the standoff has seen the government in a partial shutdown now for two and a half weeks sources have told al jazeera that turkey's prosecutor is working on the list of saudis suspects accused of murdering jamal khashoggi indicating that a trial in absentia is life you to take place the country where he was killed just a few days ago saudi arabia announced it's on trial for eleven suspects as yet to name them the day marks one hundred days since the journalists murder in the saudi consulate in istanbul venezuela's president is said to be sworn into office for a second a six year term on thursday and he has warned that he could take diplomatic measures against any latin american nation which doesn't recognize his leadership well those are the headlines on al-jazeera science of a golden age is coming up next thank you for watching. headlines warned the streets

of melbourne australia are by next good citizens under threat by african gangs. but how real the claims. one east investigates. they've been so many great advances in science over the past hundred years everything from relativity and quantum mechanics to electronics computing and space travel but none of this progress would have been possible without the mathematics of song and the development of algebra the term algebra can be traced back to the arabic word. which has its roots in the manuscript written around eight twenty

during the time i refer to as the golden age of sawyer this was the period between the ninth from fourteenth centuries when scholars in the islamic world first applied the principles of mathematics to science and jamal could be a british professor of theoretical physics but born in baghdad i'm going to look at how the mathematical underpinnings of science apply today and trace their roots back to this golden age. aviation is one of the most remarkable achievements of modern science and in order

to be sure that the planes we build stay in the sky we've needed to master the mathematics of flying. this is we come on the and be green who's a jet pilot and a mathematician. but we are straight. and you have the mathematics background so you understand more the most the mathematics involved in aviation and flying absolutely it's it is a great way to be able to understand how to fly an airplane to understand the dynamics of what's actually going on in the aircraft because i can actually dig into the equations and understand the science behind it. the mathematics that i'm interested in is something called a quadratic equation a square equation the unknown quantity x. times itself that square lower equation clique the essential basic core dry take is fundamental to how much lift an airplane can generate how fast it needs to fly it

is the basis of all aviation it's actually not as complicated as many people might think if we think about lifts and there were some various constants and then there's haul off road the squid so it looks complicated with lots of symbols but if you bracket all this all it's saying is lifts is some number it's hard to square of the velocity very simply if you go twice as fast as they squared you will get four times as much lift. which is why aerobatic airplanes are powerful they need to fly fast to do those very crisp very precise movements. if you want for instance to roll the airplane and if you double the speed it will roll four times as fast so it's better. when andy increases his speed to twice as fast because the lift depends on v.

squared this times as much lift so he can roll the plane four times as far as. our modern methods for solving mathematical problems like these involving quadratic equations go all the way back to the golden age in fact to the wonderfully titled book. which translates says the compendious book on calculation by completion and balancing it was written by the nineteenth century persian mathematician hard as me now he wasn't the first man to solve quadratic equations they go all the way back to antiquity but he was certainly the

first mathematician to provide the general method the technique the recipe for solving them what we would today call the algorithm a word derived from alcoholism is a latinized name algorithm this he is also rightly regarded as being the father of the field of algebra even the term algebra comes from the word job or in the title of his book what's most remarkable about this mathematical textbook though is not that it has any equations in it because it isn't me wrote his whole book in words alone. i'll call his muse book contains many practical everyday problems of the time such as dividing up land paying laborers or splitting up inheritance businessmen and traders would have found the equations particularly helpful that's already business men result on a tree grew up in the desert right. camels and still keeps a herd today. so i mean these are beautiful camels thank you how important are

camels in arabian and bedouin culture well come of a very important and bad when culture for transportation or milking for meat it's very important here and if i wanted to buy a camel i mean what sort of price would they fetch that expensive you know. fifty thousand to seven hundred million euros wow yes that beauty of the very expensive talking about. millions you know that's not so this is just again it's almost jealousy yes there will be attention it's very very important i mean very expensive twenty million maybe more simple one is maybe five thousand two thousand i ask you this because i want to use the value of a camel to carry out a particular mathematical calculation while. i want to give you a problem and show you the sort of thing the horrors me wrote about in his book of algebra going to use the example of

a man who dies owning just one camel which of course has to be sold now what effect campbell fetched eighty durham's the man has a friend to me because a quarter of his money he leaves the widow to me because we've won eight and he has three sons how much does each son get he would set up the algebraic equation where the unknown quantity the thing and shape is part of the equation this is what we call x. in algebra today so the way i would write it is eighty equals eighty divided by four plus eighty divided by eight plus three x. three sons each receiving x. that's what we have to work out as we work through the algorithm the recipe to work this out so if a simplify this eighty equals twenty. plus ten plus three

x. so eighties thirty plus three x. i take the thirty to the other side eighty minus thirty three x. fifty equals three x. and so x. is fifty over three which of i'm correct is sixteen and two third's there are times this sort of algebraic equation is something very complicated for people at the time of horror as me showed the recipe for carrying out very important calculations that would have been used in everyday life. that's right isn't it. andy green isn't just a pilot he's also

a world record holder in one thousand nine hundred seven he became the first and only driver to officially travel on land faster than the speed of sound. is the longest standing record in history and up till this point nobody has broken it that's about to change we're building a new car to go a lot faster. we are now building a bloodhound supersonic car it is going to be a car like no other. bloodhound has been designed using the latest engineering techniques and complex computer modeling to create such an advanced to be a cool bloodhound engineers have solved thousands of equations we're going to put the limits of modern technology one thousand six hundred kilometers an hour one thousand miles an hour forty percent faster than the speed of sound and when traveling that fast some of the most important equations deal with drag the force

of resistance that the car needs to overcome to reach a thousand six hundred kilometers an hour. exactly the same way that lift will increase by a factor of four when you double the speed the drag on the vehicle will also increase how much drag you will experience is again a square law and it's even more extreme in the land speed record context because of course we're going so much false about the square to this so enormous we're looking at sixteen hundred kilometers an hour square that it becomes a very big number and the amount of drag is immense to call. eight such an advanced high speed vehicle as well as quadratics the bloodhound engineers have also needed to solve many other types of equations press it was the car is nice work on quadratic equations then inspired other later mathematicians to solve even more complicated equations and another great i am who is regarded as one of the greatest

medieval poets in my view was an even better mathematician he was solving cubic equations involving a quantity times itself heart itself again and this is also important for bloodhound because the amount of power that's needed from the engines is a cubic equation it's extraordinary that they make that step to the cubic equation they gave us the final building block because it's not only when we double the speed we have four times the drag but it takes eight tons the power is that she added so you're trying to do and it becomes a very very large number it's that the tube which produces such a huge quantity fight they discovered it met able to answer this question.

it was just one of the many scholars who flourished in the ninth century although he was persian he spent his academic life in the city of baghdad which had become a renowned center of learning. during the first century after the birth of islam muslim armies conquered vast swathes of the old world they defeated the persians and entered iraq in seven sixty two the basset caves established their capital in the newly founded city of baghdad from which they room go over their great empire for the next five centuries and it was in baghdad that they established the famous battle heckman house of wisdom now it's not known exactly where this was or even if it was a single academy but we do know that baghdad quickly became the greatest center of knowledge of the medieval world. they are bastard rulers with generous patrons

promoting knowledge and scholarship at the silly money a library to stumble i'm meeting professor. he studied the origins of the house of wisdom there are three. hundred to. fill. that cannot. have through. the middle of the lake that. is our. cost her liver letter but i can be a. true. method that. there was a rational they were christians they were jewish scholars or those under the auspices of the islamic empire being translated into arabic many of these scholars came from all sorts of religions all working together in this one big movement.

translation was central to the early work of the house of wisdom dr peter starr has studied this translation movements extensively. i think the translations are very central to the flourishing of sciences in islam one finds that the entire corpus of scientific literature finds its way into arabic so they were translating essentially from greek mainly from greek but also of the languages are important as well from persian. from sun script when did this start so the end of the eighth century we found the translations really picking up that this is the past it yes here above all be about that period the earliest translations tend to be in those subjects which will serve the empire most medicine strong to me philosophy mathematics so without this remarkable translation movement that went on for two centuries there wouldn't have been a goal. an age at all. the

house of wisdom was much more than just a library or translation house this was the high point of islamic civilization an unrivaled center of scholarship and learning drawing on greek persian and indian texts the scholars there amassed a vast collection of world knowledge and then built on it through their own.