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Historia Mathematica 44 (2017) 283–292
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Book Reviews

The Siddhāntasundara of Jñānarāja: An English Translation with Commentary

By Toke Lindegaard Knudsen. Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press). 2014. 351 pp.

Jñānarāja’s Siddhāntasundara (“Beautiful Treatise”), a Sanskrit work on mathematical astronomy com-

posed in the early sixteenth century, has been deemed the last important siddhānta to receive the attention
of modern scholarship.1 Knudsen’s complete translation and technical commentary of this work therefore
is as timely as it is valuable. As Knudsen points out, the work is significant for several reasons. For one, it
is the first major siddhānta appearing after Bhāskara II’s substantial treatise, the Siddhāntaśiroman.i (1150
CE), after a lapse of some 350 years. Secondly, it is noteworthy because of Jñānarāja’s emphasis on provid-
ing vāsanās or ‘demonstrations’ to assist the reader in better understanding the complexities of planetary
computations and related content. Additionally, it is important because of the specific application of virod-
hapariahāra (“removal of contradiction”) that Jñānarāja has employed in his task of reconciling traditional
cosmological doctrine with the more scientific geometrical kinematic models of astronomy.
The date of the Siddhāntasundara is sunrise, Friday, September 29, 1503 CE (p. 155). Associated with the
work are three distinct chapters: the golādhyāya (“Chapter on Cosmology”), the gan.itādhyāya (‘Chapter
on Mathematical Astronomy”), and the bı̄jagan.itādhyāya (‘Chapter on Mathematics2 ”). However as this
third chapter is never found with the first two in the manuscript tradition, its relation to the work is unclear,
and Knudsen has not included it in his translation. These first two chapters are further subdivided into a
number of sections and contain topics common to the traditional siddhānta: the first chapter covers topics
on cosmology, the planetary models, astronomical instruments, and a description of the seasons. The second
chapter deals with mean and true motions, aspects related to diurnal motion, terrestrial latitude, shadows,
rising times, eclipses, rising and setting of planets, constellations, the elevation of the moon’s horns, and
planetary conjunctions. One surprising feature of this work is that despite being composed in a region which
had been under Islamic control for some time, the contents reveal no obvious traces of influence from the
Islamic mathematical astronomical tradition. However, Knudsen does point out two topics that may have
been transmitted from that tradition, namely a technique for determining square roots which is similar to
‘Heron’s method’ and a reference to crystalline spheres in the cosmological section. To this we might also
suggest as pertinent Jñānarāja’s reference, right at the end of his work, to numerical tables (kos..thakas) for
determining specific phenomena, a genre which may have been directly inspired and encouraged by the
Islamic astronomical table, or zı̄j, tradition.
Indeed, the Siddhāntasundara contains a host of distinct features that are typical for a work of Sanskrit
mathematical astronomy. Most notably, as with almost all works in the Sanskrit intellectual traditions, the
Siddhāntasundara is composed in verse, which requires that all technical content be presented in fixed met-
rical patterns, with their ultimate mode of delivery intended to be oral. In this genre, Jñānarāja flexes his
skill as an accomplished poet, frequently imbuing the technical verses with poetic flourishes (alaṅkāra) for
the delight of his audience. These include a host of stylistic literary devices including figurative language,

1 This, of course, may be subject to some debate, as much critical material in Sanskrit remains to be translated and analysed. See
the discussion in the preface (p. xv).
2 bı̄jaganita is often translated as ‘computation with unknowns’ or ‘algebra’ and is sometimes contrasted with ‘arithmetic’.
.

0315-0860/2017 Published by Elsevier Inc.

284 Book Reviews

alliteration, punning, and double entendre, to name a few. Knudsen has responded to the translation chal-
lenge double entendre presents by providing two translations, one after the other, so that the English reader
can appreciate something of the skill and depth of the original Sanskrit composition (see for instance,
pp. 36–37, pp. 104–120, pp. 226ff). Also of note is the section entitled r.tuvarn.ana (“Description of the
seasons”), containing over thirty verses giving a richly lyrical account of the six seasons. As well as this,
one can appreciate Jñānarāja’s prowess as he versifies algorithms, tabular data, diagrammatic reasoning,
technical questions and their numerical answers, and geometrical demonstrations among other technical
content.
One distinct feature of works such as these of direct interest to historians of mathematics is the way in
which mathematical ideas and content manifest themselves. This gives us glimpses not only of the vari-
ous achievements of these authors, but also the ways in which these historical practitioners thought about
mathematics, classified its various branches, its relationship with various other disciplines, and the broader
circumstances supporting the advancement of mathematical ideas. In this tradition, trigonometry, for in-
stance, appeared to be viewed as a part of astronomy proper, and is included at the beginning of the section
on determining true longitudes and velocities, as the orbital corrections involved in these processes require
trigonometrical relations. The Siddhāntasundara is no exception with respect to this point. Furthermore,
Jñānarāja includes two separate trigonometric relations (pp. 172–184); the first is the more familiar rela-
tion, with R = 3438 in steps of 3◦ ;45, as used by many of his predecessors, and the second is the so-called
‘small-Sines’, with R = 160 in steps of 9◦ , which is unique to Jñānarāja and arguably, with its smaller scale
and precision, more ‘handy’. Furthermore, the Siddhāntasundara emphasises how extensively many of the
algorithms in astronomy are generated by the so-called rule-of-three, along with the Pythagorean theorem
(see p. 223 for a substantial treatment of this with the ‘eight triangles’). Other mathematical highlights of
this work include a technique equivalent to Heron’s method to compute square-roots (p. 192), ingenious
ways to encode long sexagesimal strings of key astronomical parameters compactly in verse (p. 157ff),
and observations about the internal consistency of algorithms and the numerical parameters they generate
(p. 209).
Knudsen has based his translation on a critical edition of the text which he himself prepared from twenty
manuscripts, reflecting the scholarly integrity of his translation. However, one issue about the book needs
to be mentioned here, which arises not so much from the author’s decision, but is rather a reflection of the
broader pressures related to modern publishing and their constraints. This is the absence of the original
Sanskrit text on which the translation and commentary has been based. While unquestioningly a major
disadvantage for Sanskrit scholars, the absence of the original text is also a loss for the non-specialist
yet enthusiastic reader, who, when provided with the text, can get a direct impression of the scope and
substance of the original, and pick out technical terms throughout and the like. Indeed, this book is the
result of exacting and serious scholarly efforts and sets the tone for further scholarship on Jñānarāja and
sixteenth century mathematical astronomy. But without the original text, it is very hard for other scholars
to engage with the content in many critical ways and appreciate and react to the specific choices Knudsen
has made in various places. Furthermore, in the places where the text is corrupt or seemingly intractable,
(particularly in the latter half of chapter two, section three, for instance) it is difficult for the reader to
seriously grapple with the puzzles the text presents without the original text. Authors and readers alike
should insist upon the inclusion of original sources with translations of such technical literature.
Overall, Knudsen’s book has admirably delivered on the task of producing a translation and commentary
of this important siddhānta, and as such is a welcome asset to the field of the astral sciences in Sanskrit.
Knudsen’s clear and lucid style in many ways serves to disguise the intricacies and struggles inherent to the
task of translating technical literature from Sanskrit into English and the enormous amount of work that it
has involved, for which he is to be commended. His scholarship is thorough and dependable, and the book
will be indispensable for studies on second millennium astronomy in Sanskrit sources and indeed more
broadly to the history of pre-modern mathematical astronomy.
 Book Reviews 285

Clemency Montelle
E-mail address: clemency.montelle@canterbury.ac.nz

Available online 5 May 2017

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2017.03.006

Géométrie et Topologie différentielles (1918–1932).

By Renaud Chorlay. Paris (Hermann). 2015. ISBN 978-2-7056-8106-7. 364 pp. 45¤

The book under review is a source book collecting 12 papers from the fields of differential geometry and
differential topology in the period 1918–1932. The book is rather unusual in form, as will be explained be-
low; in the opinion of the reviewer, the sources covered are highly interesting, and the annotational material
is very illuminating. The author is a French historian of mathematics currently affiliated to SPHERE (Paris
Diderot) specialized in the history of mathematics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His former work
(2007, 2010) is on topics closely related to the subject matter of the book under review.
The papers printed here include three papers by Hermann Weyl on infinitesimal geometry, the space
problem and the theory of Lie groups (1918, 1922, 1924), six papers by Elie Cartan on generalized spaces
and related developments involving groups (1922a, 1922b, 1922c, 1925a, 1925b, 1928), and four papers on
other topics: Schreier on the theory of continuous groups (1928), Hopf on Riemannian manifolds (1932),
Threlfall on Morse theory (1939), and Veblen and Whitehead on axioms for differential geometry (1931).
Threlfall’s paper is a report on work done mostly by Morse in the 1920s, which explains why it has been
included even though it doesn’t belong to the period indicated, according to its date of publication.
There seem to be no compelling criteria for the choice of the included papers and the period covered;
Chorlay himself is quite explicit about this fact (p. 5). Perhaps one can say the following: Chorlay focused
on a series of important conceptual developments in the fields and the period covered; in many cases, he
didn’t choose the “seminal” (and often long and technical) papers themselves, but rather made use of notes
from the Comptes rendus and of conference manuscripts, both of which are instances where the author has
opportunity to explain novel ideas to a more general audience. This allowed Chorlay both to cover more
material and to include papers more easily readable (with less technical background needed). Even if all
these papers have been accessible before (in digitized form or included in collected works), some might
well have escaped the attention even of experts in the field. This is especially true of Threlfall’s paper, which
was published in a didactical journal but excellently gives a general idea of Morse theory to a wider public.
In sum, the book under review is excellent reading; it is however not obvious how to “get the larger pic-
ture”, i.e. how to identify the narrative Chorlay wants to give by his choice of material. Let me paraphrase
p. 5 of the introduction where Chorlay points to two themes: 1) diversity of geometries or of generalized
spaces (ways of defining a geometrical structure and of organizing the system of geometries) and 2) in-
terlinkage of the three levels of infinitesimal, local and global (the 1920s being the moment when global
problems made their appearance in several disciplines). The motives for the conceptual innovations come
both from outside mathematics (relativity theory) and from its inside (theory of manifolds).
Chorlay organizes the material roughly chronologically and combines the 12 papers into 8 chapters.
Among the source texts, those originally not written in French have been translated by the author, 5 from
German and one from English. The quality of the translations is very high; in cases where translation of
particular expressions was difficult, Chorlay signals the original wording in brackets. Chorlay also occa-
sionally corrects errors in existing translations (on p. 55 concerning the French translation of Weyl’s Raum,
Zeit, Materie, for instance). It is certainly one of the major merits of the book to make thus accessible some
important German sources to French-reading scholars.