4 ms·
Bakhshali manuscript
- amriksohata 3y agoCan someone explain to me what problems and solutions this solved
- lqet 3y ago> The rules are algorithms and techniques for a variety of problems, such as systems of linear equations, quadratic equations, arithmetic progressions and arithmetico-geometric series, computing square roots approximately, dealing with negative numbers (profit and loss), measurement such as of the fineness of gold, etc.
- tshadley 3y agohttps://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Bakhshali_manuscript/ https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Bakhshali_m... has some examples. |One person possesses seven asava horses, another nine haya horses, and another ten camels. Each gives two animals, one to each of the others. They are then equally well off. Find the price of each animal and the total value of the animals possesses by each person. | Two page-boys are attendants of a king. For their services one gets 13/6 dinaras a day and the other 3/2 . The first owes the second 10 dinaras. calculate and tell me when they have equal amounts.
- amriksohata 3y agoWow, maybe a more obscure question, what drives this problem solving at that day and age?
- jareklupinski 3y agoif I was a palace vizier, it might be helpful to know when people serving a king have imbalances / debts that can be exploited by others
- kdamica 3y agoNot sure about this particular text, but much of the earliest writing we have is record-keeping for taxes. You could definitely imagine this kind of math being important for tax collectors to learn, since they would typically travel around to collect taxes at some interval, and would have to calculate the amounts on the fly.
- burkaman 3y agoYeah these could be very literal problems. The first seems useful for assessing the value of a taxable asset, and the second for paying back a loan or a penalty over time.
- carapace 3y agoMath. (As in, math is it's own motivation to some minds.) These read to me like very abstract problems cast into everyday (for that time) language to make the concepts more approachable. Like "word problems" today the situations described would be apocryphal.
- bee_rider 3y agoJust for completeness, I noted in the description provided on that site: > The Bakhshali manuscript is a handbook of rules and illustrative examples together with their solutions. So, I guess these read like textbook examples because they basically are.
- photochemsyn 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_computing_square_roots#Bakhshali_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_computing_square_ro... python implementation (for numbers >= 2) def bakshali(S, iters=5, a=0, b=0): x = S//2 print(f'inital approximation = {x}') for n in range(iters): a = (S - x**2) / (2*x) b = x + a print(f'{x}') x = b - (a**2)/(2*b) return x Converges pretty fast!
- tasty_freeze 3y agoIs this common in python to declare local variables as fake parameters? The downside is obvious: it clutters the function interface with red herrings. What is the upside?
- 1024core 3y agoThe upside is that if you wanted a different "iter", "a" or "b", you could just specify it in the arguments.
- tasty_freeze 3y agoThe iter part I get, but I don't see how the caller can affect a or b. Whatever value supplied for a or b will be replaced by values in dependent of a and b during the loop. a is a function of S and x (which initially is a function of S) and b is a function of x and the just revised value for a.
- photochemsyn 3y agoNo, it was just to shorten the code block length for the comment section (for a and b, iters makes more sense as one might want to allow the caller to change that) :)
- arp242 3y agoIt's written in a script which didn't exist yet in the 3rd/4th century, which seems to rather disprove the earliest 224-383 dates, unless people want to argue that this script was in use hundreds of years before we thought it was. It does seem to fit fairly well with the 680-779 dates, which also fits with when the 0 symbol started being used. 885-993 seems a bit too late, though not strictly impossible. I'm a bit confused why the 224-383 date is even offered as a serious possibility by the researchers, because to me (admittedly as a non-expert) they seem highly unlikely and should have been dismissed as a fluke. This seems more driven by sensationalism and/or nationalism than anything else.
- civilitty 3y agoI think carbon dating has undue influence because most other methods of dating things are rather wishy washy and open to interpretation compared to cold hard quantifiable radioisotope ratios. Most people don’t know how complicated radiocarbon calibration can be and when to question the data.
- 1sembiyan 3y agoIt’s in a proto-sharada script, which it seems can be dated to earlier than 5th century. There’s no consensus on dating of the Bakhshali manuscript however: https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2018-06 https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2018-06
- Topgamer7 3y agoUnder the `Date` heading: > Prior to the proposed radiocarbon dates of the 2017 study, most scholars agreed that the physical manuscript was a copy of a more ancient text,
- josefrichter 3y agoThe first documented case of null pointer, the billion dollar mistake.
- 0xd1r 3y agoWasn't 1965, part of ALGOL W, but somewhere in the previous millenium, in a language meant for object-oriented tax collection.