Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.4

c13.4

In the history of mathematical science, it has long been a question to whom the invention of Algebraic analysis is due, among what people, in what region, was it devised, by whom was it cultivated and promoted, or by whose labours was it reduced to form and system? And finally, from what quarter did the diffusion of its knowledge proceed? No doubt indeed is entertained of the source from which it was received immediately by modern Europe; though the channel has been a matter of question. We are well assured, that the Arabs were mediately or immediately our instructors in this study. But the Arabs themselves scarcely pretend to the discovery of Algebra. They were not in general inventors but scholars, during the short period of their successful culture of the sciences: and the germ at least of the Algebraic analysis is to be found among the Greeks in an age not precisely determined, but more than probably anterior to the earliest dawn of civilization among the Arabs: and this science in a more advanced state subsisted among the Hindus prior to the earliest disclosure of it by the Arabians to modern Europe.