Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.15

c13.15

Towards the close of his treatise on Algebra,⁶ Bhascara informs us, that it is compiled and abridged from the more diffuse works on the same subject, bearing the names of Brahme, (meaning no doubt Brahmegupta) Sridhara and Padmanabha; and in the body of his treatise, he has cited a passage of Sridhara’s algebra,⁷ and another of Padmanabha’s.⁸ He repeatedly adverts to preceding writers, and refers to them in general terms, where his commentators understand him to allude to Arya-bhatta, to Brahmegupta, to the latter’s scholiast Chaturveda Prithudaca Swami,⁹ and to the other writers above mentioned.