[woodruffw]

I think you flipped the point on its end.

Of course al-Khwarizmi wasn't the first or only person to "discover" algebra - he was building off of 2000 years of Greek, Persian, Arab, and Indian work.

The point wasn't that he's another great man[1], but that it's simply incorrect to talk about "Western science and technology" as if they're either isolated or monolithic -- they're neither.

If al-Khwarizmi hadn't have been Latinized and become the reference for Western mathematics until the Renaissance, then someone else would have. But that someone else would have come from the "Eastern" world, simply by virtue of where the relevant research and academic tradition was at the time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory