Algorithm

An algorithm is a finite, exact sequence of steps for solving a class of problems or carrying out a computation, the same steps followed for every input of the kind it is built to handle. The word comes from the name of the ninth century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, whose arithmetic treatises were rendered into Latin in the twelfth century as Algoritmi, gradually becoming the modern English word. Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine included a method for the unbuilt machine to compute a sequence of Bernoulli numbers, often cited as the first algorithm published for a machine to carry out, and Alan Turing's 1936 abstract Turing machine later gave the idea a precise mathematical definition: whatever such a machine can be made to do by following a fixed table of rules.