A Persian scholar finished a single math book in 9th century Baghdad that quietly became the foundation for every line of code running on Earth today. I started reading about him at midnight and could not believe how many things in my daily life trace back to one man. His name was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. The book is called The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. Every time you say the word algebra, you are saying his book title. Every time someone says the word algorithm, they are saying his name. Both English words come from him. Both are Latin transliterations of Arabic and of his own identity. The man did not just contribute to mathematics. He named it. Here is the part almost nobody tells you. Al-Khwarizmi was born around 780 CE in Khwarazm, in what is now Uzbekistan. He moved to Baghdad and worked at a research institution called the House of Wisdom, which during the Islamic Golden Age was the single most important center of learning on the planet. The caliph al-Mamun hired the best mathematicians, astronomers, and philosophers from across three continents and put them in one building with one job. Translate, study, and produce new knowledge. Al-Khwarizmi finished his book on algebra around 820 CE. The Arabic title contained the word al-jabr, which referred to one of the two operations he used to solve equations. When the book was translated into Latin in the 12th century, the Latin world did not have a word for what he had built. So they kept his Arabic word. Al-jabr became algebra. The discipline was named after a single Arabic word in the title of a single book by a single man. The deeper insight is what he actually changed about how humans think. Before al-Khwarizmi, mathematical problems were solved geometrically. You drew shapes. You measured them. You compared areas. The Greeks had built an entire mathematical tradition on visual proofs and physical constructions. It was beautiful and limited. You could not solve a problem you could not draw. Al-Khwarizmi did something nobody had done before him at this scale. He said you could solve any problem using abstract symbols and rules. You did not need a shape. You needed a procedure. You moved terms across the equation. You cancelled like terms on both sides. You isolated the unknown. He invented the idea that mathematics is a manipulation of symbols according to rules, not a study of physical figures. That single shift made everything that came afterward possible. Calculus. Differential equations. Linear algebra. Quantum mechanics. None of it works if math is locked inside geometry. He pulled it out. The second thing he did is the one that changed how the world counted forever. He took the Hindu numeral system from Indian mathematics, refined it, and wrote a book introducing it to the Arab world. That system included the concept of zero as a placeholder, and a positional notation where the value of a digit depends on its location. Roman numerals could not do complex calculation. Hindu-Arabic numerals could. When his book on numerals was translated into Latin as Algoritmi de numero Indorum, the word Algoritmi was just the Latin spelling of his own name. Europeans started calling the new method "doing algorism," then "running an algorithm." The word for the most important concept in computer science is literally his name in Latin. The third thing he did is the part that should haunt anyone who works in tech. His method of solving problems was systematic. Step one, do this. Step two, check that. Step three, if condition A, then do X, otherwise do Y. He wrote down procedures that could be followed by anyone, anywhere, who knew how to read. The procedure did not depend on intuition or genius. It worked because the steps worked. That is exactly what an algorithm is. A finite, deterministic procedure for solving a problem. He did not just give us the word. He gave us the entire concept of programming a thousand years before there was anything to program. When Alan Turing built the first abstract model of computation in 1936, when John von Neumann designed the first stored-program computer in 1945, when every engineer at Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind writes code in 2026, they are working in a paradigm that started with one man in Baghdad twelve centuries ago. The strangest part is what happens when you walk into any tech office in San Francisco or Bangalore or Lahore today. Engineers say the words algebra and algorithm hundreds of times a day. They do not know whose name they are saying. Almost nobody can spell al-Khwarizmi correctly on the first try. His original Arabic manuscript is preserved at Oxford. His book on Hindu numerals survives only in Latin translation. The Latin version was the textbook that taught medieval Europe how to count. The man who built the foundation of the AI revolution did not live to see a calculator. He died around 850 CE, a thousand years before the first electric current was sent through a wire. The civilization he built mathematics for collapsed. The library he wrote in burned. His own grave is unmarked. But every algorithm running on every machine on Earth right now still answers to his name.

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, offers a sobering view: The biggest technological shift in human history is happening, and almost no one is talking about it. Schmidt opens with a startling industry prediction: "We believe as an industry that in the next one year the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI programmers. We also believe that within one year you will have graduate level mathematicians that are at the tippy top of graduate math programs." He explains why this matters so much. Programming and math aren't just two fields among many: "Programming plus math are the basis of sort of our whole digital world." And the AI labs are already using AI to build better AI: "The research groups in OpenAI and anthropic and so forth… around 10 or 20% of the code that they're developing in their research programs is being generated by the computer. That's called recursive self-improvement." @ericschmidt then lays out the timeline most people haven't grasped: "Within 3 to 5 years we'll have what is called general intelligence AGI which can be defined as a system that is as smart as the smartest mathematician physicist artist writer thinker politician." He gives this belief system a name: "I call this by the way the San Francisco consensus because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco it may be the water." But the truly unsettling part comes next. Once AI starts improving itself, humans become optional to the process: "The computers are now doing self-improvement… they don't have to listen to us anymore. We call that super intelligence or ASI… computers that are smarter than the sum of humans. The San Francisco consensus is this occurs within six years." And here's where Schmidt sounds the alarm. The conversation isn't keeping pace with the technology: "This path is not understood in our society. There's no language for what happens with the arrival of this. This is happening faster than our human that our society, our democracy, our laws will address." His closing thought captures why this matters: "That's why it's underhyped. People do not understand what happens when you have intelligence at this level which is largely free."

One of the rare times Haya and I appear together in an interview. Enjoy!

Just six countries control the majority of the world’s oil and gas reserves. What was true after Russia's invasion of Ukraine is true for the war in Iran: Leaders must help reduce the acute dependencies that often fuel tensions, annexations and wars. Read Sapienship’s new brief on Energy Security - sapienship.co/energy-securit…

🚨🇺🇸 Jesse Jackson has died at 84 2-time presidential candidate, civil rights legend, confidant to Martin Luther King Jr., and one of the most consequential Black political figures in American history. He marched at Selma. He was standing next to King when he was assassinated. He ran for president twice and changed who gets to run in America. Love him or hate him, Jackson spent 60 years refusing to let America forget its promises to Black people. He outlived almost everyone who stood beside him in the movement. Rest in peace.