If Brin lived in Russia, spoke Russian, and wrote books in Russian we wouldn't call him American just because he wrote a few books in English too.

Perhaps you're not familiar with the history of that part of the world, but the individuals that I named were Persian speakers, who lived in a region that is called the Greater Iran today, and wrote most of their work in Persian. But in all fairness, Arabic was the lingua-franca at the time so they wrote books in Arabic too.

A better example would be to call Grigori Perelman an American mathematician because he published his work on arXiv [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0303109

> If Brin lived in Russia, spoke Russian, and wrote books in Russian we wouldn't call him American just because he wrote a few books in English too.

But if he spoke Enlgish, had an English name, lived his professional life in America. and most of his major works were in Enlgish.

I'd supposed you'd call him an "Anglophone" academic, which is the sense that Arab is used in.

>the individuals that I named were Persian speakers, who lived in a region that is called the Greater Iran today, and wrote most of their work in Persian

And yet they are called Arab mathematicians.

you named al khawarizmi, which is the only one that I'm really familiar with.

he spoke arabic. Most of his major works were in arabic, in Baghdad. and he has an arabic name.