Anuj Misra. The chapter on spheres in a seventeenth century text on mathematical astronomy
In 1628 Nityananda rendered Mulla Farid's Zij-i Shah Jahani into Sanskrit. This is a rare case: two computational traditions, Indian and Islamic, meeting not in paraphrase but in one text, where one can watch the one digest the other.
Misra examines the chapter on spheres line by line: Sanskrit text, translation, mathematical commentary. It becomes clear that Nityananda does not merely translate — he fits Sanskrit terms to foreign concepts, and where the concepts do not fit he rebuilds the exposition.
For us the book is valuable less for its subject than for its method. It shows how seventeenth-century Indian computers handled someone else's parameters: what they accepted, what they reworked, what they quietly discarded. Our engine is occupied with the same question, only with respect to a program rather than a manuscript.
University of Canterbury, March 2016, four hundred and twenty-six pages.
Details: 426 pages, 36.6 MB.