Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.63
Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.63
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c13.63
In a very general sense, the analytic art, as Hindu writers observe, is merely sagacity exercised; and is independent of symbols, which do not constitute the art. In a more restricted sense, according to them, it is calculation attended with the manifestation of its principles: and, as they further intimate a method aided by devices, among which symbols and literal signs are conspicuous.95 Defined, as analysis by an illustrious modern mathematician,96 ‘a method of resolving mathematical problems by reducing them to equations,’ it assuredly is not to be found in the works of any Grecian writer extant, besides Diophantus.