If you’ve screamed NO!!! at this page, I have a confession to make — algebra was my favourite bit of maths at school — I think it was because it felt a little like a secret code that I was deciphering. Well, love it or hate it — or perhaps you’ve not come across it yet — I bet you won’t be able to guess how it all began…

The word al means ‘the’ in the language of Arabic, which is where the adventure of algebra first began. Alcohol and alchemy (the magic art of turning metals into gold) are also words that travelled all the way from the exotic East.

Back then, ‘algebra’ didn’t just mean funny mathematical symbols though — originally it was all about putting human bones back together! The Arabic al-jabr meant ‘the reuniting’, and this is exactly what surgeons and doctors used to do with broken bones: they would put them back together in the right place by ‘setting’ them. Perhaps the sight of a lot of complicated mathematical symbols reminded ancient mathematicians of a jumbled pile of bones — and that is why they called such formulae as ‘x = y’ ‘algebra’ too. Think of that in your next maths lesson, and try not to giggle (or groan)!