Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.32

c13.32

Admitting the Hindu and Alexandrian authors to be nearly equally ancient, it must be conceded in favour of the Indian algebraist, that he was more advanced in the science; since he appears to have been in possession of the resolution of equations involving several unknowns, which it is not clear, nor fairly presumable, that Diophantus knew; and a general method for indeterminate problems of at least the first degree, to a knowledge of which the Grecian algebraist had certainly not attained;