Basic Mathematics

Author(s): L C Jain
Publisher: Rajasthan Prakrit Bharti Sansthan Jaipur

Page 37

areas of polygons, but Mahāvīrācārya is the only one to make any point of those that are reentrant. All of them touch upon the area of a segment of a circle, but all give different rules. The so called janya operation is akin to work found in Brahmagupta and yet none of the problems is the same. The shadow problems, primitive cases of trigonometry and gnomonics, suggest a similarity among these three great writers, and yet those of Mahāvīrācārya are much better than the one to be found in either Brahmgupta or Bhaskar, and no question is duplicated.46"
op. cit., p. 75. For the work of his successor, Bhāskara II, cf, a recent
on "Some Mathematical Contributions of ancient Indian Mathematicians as given in the Works of Bhāskarā carya II, (12th cent. A. D.), I. J. H. S., vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 45-56, 1977. A series of papers by R. C. Gupta have been published in Mathematics Education, under the caption, Glimpses of Ancient Indian Mathematics and perhaps still continuing. Cf, in the same series, Mahāvirācārya on the Perimeter and Area of an Elipse, M. E., vol. VIII, no 1, 1974, Sec. B., 17-19. Cf. also his correction in, “Mahāvirācārya's Rule for the Surface Area of a Spherical Segment : a new interpretation, Tulsi Prajña-2, 63-66.
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