On two conjectures that shaped the historiography of indeterminate analysis: Strachey and Chasles on Sanskrit sources (Q309803)

A particularly interesting look at the colorful historiography of mathematics in the 19th century, this is a study of the interpretations by historians of methods of indeterminate analysis (such as the \textit{cakravāla} method, the \textit{kuṭṭaka} method, the \textit{bhāvanā} rules of Bhāskara and of his predecessor Brahmagupta), translated and made known to Europeans during the second decade of the 19th century. It was realized that what was considered to be recent work by Bachet, Euler, and Lagrange was of much earlier origin. The cast of characters include William Strachey, a British scholar who identified an algebraic theory in Bhāskara's \textit{Bīja-gaṇita} in a Persian translation, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, who translated from the Sanskrit original both Bhāskara and his predecessor Brahmagupta, Michel Chasles, who reconstructed the manner in which the rules were obtained as being, in essence, geometrical (so that it was not by chance that Brahmagupta also dealt with cyclic quadrilaterals, those methods being shown to lead to the apparently \textit{algebraic} methods), ``aiming at promotion pure geometry over analysis'', Guglielmo Libri, who dismissed Chasles's hypothesis, Louis-Amélie Sédillot and Franz Woepke who provided additional material that allowed interpretations mostly in line with Chasles's expectations, and finally Baldassare Boncompagni and Hermann Hankel, each with their own views on these matters.