Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c12.12

c12.12

With respect to the Binomial Theorem, the application of it to fractional indices will perhaps remain for ever the exclusive property of Newton; but the following question and its solution evidently show that the Hindoos understood it in whole numbers to the full as well as Briggs, and much better than Pascal. Dr Hutton, in a valuable edition of Sherwin’s tables, has lately done justice to Briggs; but Mr Witchell, who some years before pointed out Briggs as the undoubted inventor of the differential method, said he had found some indications of the Binomial Theorem in much older authors: the method however by which that great man investigated the powers independent of each other, is exactly the same as that in the following translation from the Sanscrit.