Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.71

c13.71

But the age of the earliest known Hindu writer on Algebra, not being with certainty carried to a period anterior, or even quite equal to that in which Diophantus is on probable grounds placed, the argument of priority, so far as investigation has yet proceeded, is in favour of Grecian invention. The Hindus, however, had certainly made distinguished progress in the science, so early as the century immediately following that in which the Grecian taught the rudiments of it. The Hindus had the benefit of a good arithmetical notation: the Greeks, the disadvantage of a bad one. Nearly allied as algebra is to arithmetic, the invention of the algebraic calculus was more easy and natural where arithmetic was best handled. No such marked identity of the Hindu and Diophantine systems is observed, as to demonstrate communication. They are sufficiently distinct to justify the presumption, that both might be invented independently of each other.