history of mathematics

By the time the Babylonians and Egypt developed their mathematics; Indians had worked independently and made an advanced mathematical discovery. During the early time of Indian, they were already familiar with arithmetic operations such as addition, multiplication, subtraction, multiplication, fractions, squares, cubes and roots. The evidence of using Pythagorean triples was also traced as part of Hindu mathematics long before Pythagoras. The Indian text known as “Sulba Sutras” contains a geometric approach in finding the solutions of linear and quadratic equations. The use of circle to represent zero is usually attributed to Hindu mathematics. Early Indians are also known to be the first to establish the basic mathematical rules for dealing with zero. They had also established the laws that could be used to manipulate and perform calculation on negative numbers, something that was not manifested in unearthed mathematical works of other ancient mathematics. Brahmagupta, a Hindu mathematician, showed that quadratic equations could have two possible solutions and one of which could be negative.

In India, there was an era called “the Golden Age of Indian Mathematics. At this period, several refined and advanced mathematics were recorded. The concept of sine, cosine, and tangent in land surveying and navigations were already known to them. In addition, the use of trigonometry to calculate the distance between the earth, the moon, and sun was already part of Hindu’s culture. As the western civilization made some innovations in astronomy, Indian had already grasped the idea that the sun, moon, and the earth form a right-angled triangle when the moon is in half full and situated directly opposite the sun. It is really surprising th...

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...successors had successfully initiated the application of arithmetic and geometry of Greek to Algebra and vice versa. Al-Karaji was known to have started the algebraic approach free from geometrical operations and with the use of arithmetical types of operations which are still considered the core of today’s Algebra.

In the areas of Mathematics, Indian’s and Arab’s contributions might not have yet received historical recognition and instead of giving credits, some of their works were accused to have been plagiarized from the western works. But their role for further development of mathematical ideas couldn’t be ignored. Their contributions, especially in the field of algebra and trigonometry, and its application to various fields of Modern Science such as astronomy is such a stunning success different from the brilliant works of Greeks and other ancient empires.