[HN Gopher] Bakhshali manuscript
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Bakhshali manuscript
Author : talonx
Score : 85 points
Date : 2023-10-30 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| amriksohata wrote:
| Can someone explain to me what problems and solutions this solved
| lqet wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wow, maybe a more obscure question, what drives this problem
| solving at that day and age?
| jareklupinski wrote:
| if 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 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| Yeah 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 wrote:
| Math.
|
| (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 wrote:
| Just 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| The upside is that if you wanted a different "iter", "a" or
| "b", you could just specify it in the arguments.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| No, 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It'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
| arp242 wrote:
| According to the article the proto-script emerged more during
| middle of the seventh century.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| Under 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,
| arp242 wrote:
| Perhaps, but that's not very relevant for the dating of this
| specific physical piece of text.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > unless people want to argue that this script was in use
| hundreds of years before we thought it was.
|
| Is that script attested in hundreds of other (dated) works,
| such that this really is absurd... or is it attested by two or
| three other works which might have been misdated themselves? I
| ask because I genuinely do not know. With one sort of answer,
| it seems like it could be as absurd as you suggest, but with
| the other sort of answer it seems like there could be the
| possibility of it being that old.
| josefrichter wrote:
| The first documented case of null pointer, the billion dollar
| mistake.
| 0xd1r wrote:
| Wasn't 1965, part of ALGOL W, but somewhere in the previous
| millenium, in a language meant for object-oriented tax
| collection.
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