For the fact remains that without Arab help, western Europe would never have recovered its knowledge of Greek science and mathematics—still the foundations of modern science today—or understood how to interpret it.7 Arabs supplied Europe with a new scientific vocabulary, with words like algebra, zero, cipher, almanac, and alchemy; and a new system of recording numbers that we still call Arabic numerals. Arab tables of astronomic observation and mathematical calculation, as well as manuals on medicine, introduced the Western mind to the great discoveries of the Greeks—as did the works of Arab
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