Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Reduction (mathematics)" in English language version.
It is not certain just what the terms al-jabr and muqabalah mean, but the usual interpretation is similar to that implied in the translation above. The word al-jabr presumably meant something like "restoration" or "completion" and seems to refer to the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation, which is evident in the treatise; the word muqabalah is said to refer to "reduction" or "balancing"—that is, the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides of the equation.
