‘Algebra’ is of Arabic derivation. It comes from title of the justly famous ninth century Arabic mathematical text ‘al-jebr w’almuquabala ‘by Mohammed ibn Musa Al-Khowarizmi of Baghdad and Damascus.

Have you never wondered about algebra
The Greeks are famed for genius  in the bath
Inventing logic and drowning under irrational numbers
Was it not Euclid who dominated your adolescence with his theorems
Those isosceles triangles, the very name chosen by the scholars of their age?
Those  strange numbers pi and e, the square root of 2 sent them running into conic sections
Straight lines and perfect forms.
Until Descartes with his fine drawn dramas of separation
Took the shape of geometry and rewrote it in abstract algebra
Unthinkable to the ghost of Archimedes with his sling and pendulum
The step into the higher realm left us grieving for our diagrams
And children wondering what the hell is x when it’s at home
‘al-jebr w’almuquabala”
Sacked Constaninople, now Istanbul, libraries looted as ideas ran like electronic rabbits
Up the spine of Europe,like giant fleas on LSD, like the manic humans we are on our dose of screens
Suddenly dimensions could be 4,5, 6… a million who could define a  limit?
Potent startled numbers shot out of fireworks, out of atom bombs, like   idiot stars
And the Universe exploded into God’s eye; a golden kite;  infinite attachments
Set fire to fields and borders as soldiers vainly shot the people they imagined
Were to blame.
If only we  didn’t know that there are no limits to our imagination
We could easily have lived  and died  bored into sanity by those diagrams
Flaunted by teachers, ignorant believers in hard facts
The whole world’s a fantasy, good or bad, algebra is the thrill up your spine
The hammer on your head
The beauty of the pattern  multiplying on invisible needles like God’s fairisle shawl
Tossed into the heavens and hanging forever, full of stars and  holes
Some black