section_path: History/Islamic Golden Age/Māl and kaʿbah ("square" and "cube")
section_name: Māl and kaʿbah ("square" and "cube")
paragraph_text: Māl and kaʿbah ("square" and "cube")
  
  In the 9th century, the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi used the terms مَال (māl, "possessions", "property") for a square —the Muslims, "like most mathematicians of those and earlier times, thought of a squared number as a depiction of an area, especially of land, hence property" —and كَعْبَة (Kaʿbah, "cube") for a cube, which later Islamic mathematicians represented in mathematical notation as the letters mīm (m) and kāf (k), respectively, by the 15th century, as seen in the work of Abu'l-Hasan ibn Ali al-Qalasadi.