Note: "Influenced by al-Khowarizmi and later Islamic writers who called the unknown [i.e., the variable x] shai, Arabic for "thing", Latin texts used res and those in Italian used cosa ("thing"). In Italy, algebra became known as l'arte della cosa, in England as cossike arte, or the rule of coss, and in Germany, die Coss." Jan Gullberg, Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers (New York, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), page 299.
