1 from SIAM News, Volume 33, Number 4 By Barry A. Cipra Algos is the Greek word for pain. Algor is Latin, to be cold. Neither is the root for algorithm, which stems instead from al- Khwarizmi, the name of the ninth-century Arab scholar whose book al-jabr wa’l muqabalah devolved into today’s high school algebra textbooks. Al-Khwarizmi stressed the importance of methodical procedures for solving pr