Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s3.11

c6.s3.11

Proceeding further while deploring the lack of ‘analysis’ even in the *Vija Ganita*, he noted that Brahmagupta had given ‘a solution that appears quite general’ concerning ‘Indeterminate Problems’. And he observed: The solution then of a very difficult problem given by an Indian Algebraist, more than 1200 years ago, is such as can vie with those of two of the mathematicians the most distinguished for genius and invention which Europe could boast of ever having seen, at the end of the eighteenth century.’ Dismissing that the finding of such a solution by Brahmagupta may have been due to chance, he added, ‘there are inquiries where chance and accident have great influence and where a man of very inferior genius and knowledge may make great discoveries. But the subject we are treating of here, is not of that number; it is one where no one *finds*, who does not know how to *search*; and where there is no reward but for intense thought, and patient inquiry.’