Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad during the reign of Caliph al-Ma'mun, a place that gathered scholars from various cultures to translate and advance the sciences of their time.

Al-Khwarizmi is considered the founder of algebra as an independent branch of mathematics, having developed systematic methods for solving equations in his book. He also helped develop and spread the Hindu-Arabic numeral system across the Islamic world and later Europe.