Science - - Posted on May, 22 at 12:43 pm
The world undoubtedly owes a lot to India in the field of mathematics, which sprouted in antiquity but flowered in the Gupta times to a stage more advanced than that reached by any other ancient nation. In Vedic times, it was the necessity of accurately laying out the site of a sacrifice that resulted in a simple geometric system.
Ancient Indians evidently had a clear conception of abstract number, as distinct from numerical quantity of objects or spatial extension. While Greek mathematical science was largely based on mensuration and geometry, Indian mathematicians went beyond these conceptions. With the help of a simple numeral notation, they came up with a basic form of algebra, which enabled more complex calculations than were possible to the Greeks.
In early inscriptions, dates and numerals are written in styles similar to those of the Romans, Greeks and Hebrews, with different symbols for the tens and hundreds. The earliest inscription recording the date by a system of nine digits and a zero, with place notation for the tens and hundreds, comes from what is now Gujarat, dated 595 CE. In any case, by this time, this new system had been introduced in Syria, and was probably in use in Indo-China.
Brahmagupta, Mahavira and Bhaskara, medieval mathematicians all, made many discoveries, which in Europe were not known until the Renaissance or later. They understood positive and negative quantities, developed systems of extracting square and cube roots, and could solve quadratic and some types of indeterminate equations.
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