Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.102

c9.102

59. The preceding calculations must have required the assistance of many subsidiary tables, of which no trace has yet been found in India. Besides many other geometrical propositions, some of them also involve the ratio which the diameter of a circle was supposed to bear to its circumference, but which we would find it impossible to discover from them exactly, on account of the small quantities that may have been neglected in their calculations. Fortunately, we can arrive at this knowledge, which is very material when the progress of geometry is to be estimated, from a passage in the *Ayeen Akbery*, where we are told, that the Hindoos suppose the diameter of a circle to be its circumference as 1250 to 3927,79 and where the author, who knew that this was more accurate than the proportion of Archimedes, (7 to 22), and believed it to be perfectly exact, expresses his astonishment, that among so simple a people, there should be found a truth, which, among the wisest and most learned nations, had been sought for in vain.