Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.47

c13.47

To pursue this summary comparison further, Diophantus appears to have been acquainted with the direct resolution of affected quadratic equations; but less familiar with the management of them, he seldom touches on it. Chiefly busied with indeterminate problems of the first degree, he yet seems to have possessed no general rule for their solution. His elementary instructions for the preparation of equations are succinct.80 His notation, as before observed, scanty and inconvenient. In the whole science, he is very far behind, the Hindu writers: not withstanding the infinite ingenuity, by which he makes up for the want of rule: and although presented to us under the disadvantage or mutilation; if it be, indeed, certain that the text of only six, or at most seven, of thirteen books which his introduction announces, has been preserved.⁸¹ It is sufficiently clear from what does remain, that the lost part could not have exhibited a much higher degree of attainment in the art. It is presumable, that so much as we possess of his work, is a fair specimen of the progress which he and the Greeks before him (for he is hardly to be considered as the inventor, since he seems to treat the art as already known) had made in his time.