Hindu Achievements in Exact Science: A Study in the History of Scientific Development c8.2

c8.2

ALGEBRA is a Hindu science in spite of the Arabic name. Cajori suspects that Diophantus (A.D. 360), the first Greek algebraist, got the first glimpses of algebraic knowledge from India. According to Heath, the Europeans were anticipated by the Hindus in the symbolic form of algebra. According to De Morgan, the work of Diophantus is hardly algebraic in the sense in which that term can be applied to the science of India.³³ According to Hankel, the Hindus are the real inventors of algebra if we define algebra as the application of arithmetical operations to both rational and irrational numbers or magnitudes.⁴