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The word, sine, has a curious history. The Sanskrit term for sine in an astronomical context was jya-ardha ("half-cord"). This was later abbreviated to jya. Islamic scholars, who learned about the sine from the Indians, called it jiba. One Islamic mathemetician, Muhumad ibn Musa al-Kwarizmi (A.D. 780-850), wrote Hisab al-jabr wa'l-muqabala (The Book of Restoration and Confrontation). In Segovia, around 1140, Robert of Chester read jiba as jaib when he was translating al-Khwarizmi's book from Arabic to Latin. One meaning of jaib is "indentation" or "gulf". So jiba was translated into Latin as sinus ("fold" or "curve") and from that we get the word sine. |
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