Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.23

c13.23

Brahmegupta’s treatise, however, is not the earliest work known to have been written on the same subject by an Indian author. The most eminent scholiast of Bhascara²⁵ quotes a passage of Arya-bhatta specifying algebra under the designation of Vija, and making separate mention of Cuttaca, which more particularly intends a problem subservient to the general method of resolution of indeterminate problems of the first degree: he is understood by another of Bhascara’s commentators²⁶ to be at the head of the elder writers, to whom the text then under consideration adverts, as having designated by the name of Madhyamaharana the resolution of affected quadratic equations by means of the completion of the square. It is to be presumed, therefore, that the treatise of Arya-bhatta then extant, did extend to quadratic equations in the determinate analysis; and to indeterminate problems of the first degree; if not to those of the second likewise, as most probably it did.