Ganitsara Sangrah

Author(s): Mahaviracharya, A N Upadhye, Hiralal Jain, L C Jain
Publisher: Jain Sanskriti Samrakshak Sangh

Page 412

गणित सारसंग्रह
we are now receiving new light upon the subject of Oriental mathematics, as known in another part of India and at a time about midway between that of Aryabhata and Bhaskara, and two centuries later than Brahmagupta. The learned scholar, Professor M. Rangacārya of Madras, some years ago became interested in the work of Mahaviracārya, and has now completed its translation, thus making the mathematical world his perpetual debtor; and I esteem it a high honour to be requested to write an introduction to so noteworthy a work.
७३
Mahaviracārya appears to have lived in the court of an old Raṣṭrakūta monarch, who ruled probably over much of what is now the kingdom of Mysore and other Kanarese tracts, and whose name is given as Amōghavarsa Nrpatunga. He is known to have ascended the throne in the first half of the ninth century A. D., so that we may roughly fix the date of the treatise in question as about 850.
The work itself consists, as will be seen, of nine chapters like the Bija-ganita of Bhaskara; it has one more chapter than the Kuttaka of Brahmagupta. There is, however, no significance in this number, for the chapters are not at all parallel, although certain of the otpics of Brahmagupta's Ganita and Bhaskara's Līlāvatī are included in the Ganita-Sara-Sangraha.
In considering the work, the reader naturally repeats to himself the great questions that are so often raised:-How much of this Hindu treatment is original ? What evidences are there here of Greek influence ? What relation was there between the great mathematical centres of India? What is the distinctive feature, if any, of the Hindu algebraic theory?
Such questions are not new. Davis and Strachey, Colebrooke and Taylor, all raised similar ones a century ago, and they are by no means satisfactorily answered even yet. Nevertheless, we are making good progress towards their satisfactory solution in the not too distant future. The past century has seen several Chinese and Japanese mathematical works made more or less familiar to the West; and the more important Arab treatises are now quite satisfactorily known, Various editions of Bhaskara have appeared in India; and in general the great treatises of the Orient