algorist

English

Etymology

A corruption of the name al-Khwārizmī, who introduced the use of arabic numerals.

Noun

algorist (plural algorists)

1. One who uses Arabic numerals to represent numbers and to perform calculations, as opposed to one who uses Roman numerals to represent numbers and an abacus to perform calculations.

   Antonym: abacist

   • 1953, Burdette Ross Buckingham, Elementary Arithmetic: Its Meaning and Practice, page 344:

     In the handling of numbers the dream of the algorist was to free men from a machine.

   • 1977, Cynthia Conwell Cook, Western mathematics comes of age, page 55:

     Navigators, astronomers, scientists, mathematicians, and others who were involved in a great deal of calculating were rather readily converted to the algorist inclination.

   • 1992, Albert B. Bennett, Leonard T. Nelson, Mathematics for elementary teachers: a conceptual approach, page 67:

     The sixteenth-century print at the left shows an abacist competing against an algorist.

   • 2002, Journal of Engineering Mechanics, page 2002:

     On the other hand, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the competition between the abacist who used an abacus for computation and the algorist who invoked Arabic numerical calculations became quite furious. Eventually, the algorist won acceptance.

2. One who develops algorithms.
   • 1987, Mathematical Education - Volume 4, page 64:

     As an algorist Ramanujan had few peers in the world of mathematics.

   • 2000, Geoffrey Poitras, The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478-1776:

     It was in Lyons where Nicholas Chuquet, a master algorist, worked and by 1484 completed a series of manuscripts referred to as the Triparty.

   • 2012, E. T. Bell, The Development of Mathematics, page 519:

     Always the daring algorist, Euler occasionally trusted his formulas too far, and was unperturbed when they propesied material absurdities.

   • 2014, E.T. Bell, Men of Mathematics, page 140:

     As an algorist Euler has never been surpassed, and probably never even closely approached, unless perhaps by Jacobi.

3. The aspect of a biological organism that follows a systematic process to interpret perceptual data.
   • 1976, Haskins Laboratories, Status Report on Speech Research:

     What we witness in Trevarthan's and Halliday's behavioral and protolinguistic analyses of infant line, is the infant as algorist possessing and deploying a stock of fundamental strategies or modes for selectively operating upon the world.

   • 1981, Claire F. Michaels, Claudia Carello, Direct perception, page 75:

     The first issue is whether or not an agent or algorist is extraneous to a theory that can, in principle or fact, accurately and completely describe both the algorithms (in this case, the rules and procedures specifying how a biological machine detects information) and the data (invariant energy structures) upon which those algorithms operate.

   • 1982, Karl M. Dallenbach, Madison Bentley, Edwin Garrigues Boring, The American Journal of Psychology - Volume 95, page 212:

     It is very difficult not to construe the algorist as homunculus, although claims are made to the contrary. The algorist is somehow not simply the perceiver (otherwise that word would do).

Anagrams

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