One of Khwãrezm’s most famous residents was Muhammad ibn Mūsa al-Khwarizmī, an influential 9th century scholar, astronomer, geographer, and mathematician known especially for his contributions to the study of algebra. Though the region is arid, the Amu Darya provides enough water to irrigate large swaths of the desert-even as it has caused the Aral Sea to shrink. On August 20, 2017, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of present-day Khwãrezm, which sits along the borders of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. With its easy access to water in an otherwise arid region, this area near the Aral Sea was once the seat of influential civilizations ruled by Persian and Central Asian ethnic groups. The word itself has an interesting origin story that traces back to Khwãrezm (which has several variant spellings), an oasis region in Central Asia along the Amu Darya. The concept of an algorithm has a long history that involves the invention of numerals, mathematics, and computers. While algorithms are used in other contexts, they are most widely used in computer programming.Īlmost all of the 2,400 earth science data products distributed by NASA-from precipitation products produced by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission to aerosol products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-are dependent on sets of algorithms that help transform raw observations into data products that are useful to scientists. If you walk the halls of NASA’s research facilities, you will likely overhear scientists talking about algorithms-the detailed, often repetitive sequences of rules used in mathematical calculations or other problems.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |