ALGEBRA WITH ARITHMETIC AND MENSURATION FROM THE SANSCRIT OF BRAHMEGUPTA AND BHASCARA

The object of the present publication is to exhibit the science in the state in which the Hindus posscssed it, by an exact version of the most approved treatise on it in the ancient language of India, with one of the earlier treatises from which it was compiled. The design of this preliminary dissertation is to deduce from these and from the evidence which will be here offered the degree of advancement to which the science had arrived in a remote age. Observations will be added tending to a comparison of the Indian, with the Arabian, the Grecian and the modern Algebra. In the actual advanced condition of the analytic art it is not hoped that this version of ancient Sanscrit treatises on Algebra, Arithmetic and Mensuration, will add to the resources of the art, and throw new light on mathematical science, in any other respect, than as concerns its history. Yet the remark may not seem inapposite, that had an earlier version of these treatises been completed, had they been translated and given to the public, when the notice of mathematicians was first drawn to the attainments of the Hindus in astronomy and in sciences connected with it, some addition would have been then made to the means and resources of Algebra for the general solution of problems by methods which have been re-invented or have been perfected, in the last age.