Summary of TedTalk Video ( Why the X is Unknown ? By Terry Moore )

Why the letter X represent the unknown?  There are many thing represent X as unknown things such as The X prize, The X-Files, Project X, TED X, Where that comes from? About six years ago,  the speaker decided to learn Arabic, which according to him, Arabic turn out to be supremely a logical language because to write a word or phrase or sentence in Arabic is like assemble an equation. That is one reason, we see that western science, mathematic and engineering nowdays was really worked out in the first few century of the common era by the persian, Arab and Turk. This include the little system in Arabic called al-jebr which is came to English as aljabar. Al-jebr translate to “The system for match the desperate part. 

 The Arabic text containing the mathematic wisdom  and finally in Europe which is Spain in the 11-12 century. And when they write, they were tremendous interest in  translating this Arabic into the European language. But they found problems, one of them is there are some sound in Arabic that just cannot spelled by European without a lot of practice. Also, those spell sounds tend to be not represent by the characters that aviable in European language. For example, this is the letter “SYIN” that make the sound that we assume as SH . It also the very first word “SYAILAN” which mean something, just like the English word “SOMETHING”, some undefine and unknown thing. In Arabic, we can make it definite by adding the article “al” so this is “al-syailan” means the unknown thing. This is the word appear surround early of  mathematic, such as the 10-c derivation of roots.

The problem from the Spanish scolar in the Middle Century who translate this material is the letter “Sheen” and the word “Shailan” can not be changed into Spanish because Spanish does’nt have that SH letter. So, by convention, they create the rule in which they borrow the sound “CK” from the classical Greek in  the form of letter ‘CHI (X). Then, when this material is translated into a common European language, which let say Latin. They simply replace the Greek “CHI” with the letter latin “X”.

And after it occured, after this material translate into Latin. This material formed the basis Mathematic text book for almost 600 years. So why is letter X is unknown? The answer us X become the unknown because we cannot say “SH” in Spanish.