- Provides an up-to-date, more accessible guide to Sanskrit astronomical tables
- Contains an inventory of all of the identified individual works in this genre
- Includes a glossary of the relevant Sanskrit terms
Buy this book
- About this book
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This groundbreaking volume provides an up-to-date, accessible guide to Sanskrit astronomical tables and their analysis. It begins with an overview of Indian mathematical astronomy and its literature, including table texts, in the context of history of pre-modern astronomy. It then discusses the primary mathematical astronomy content of table texts and the attempted taxonomy of this genre before diving into the broad outlines of their representation in the Sanskrit scientific manuscript corpus. Finally, the authors survey the major categories of individual tables compiled in these texts, complete with brief analyses of some of the methods for constructing and using them, and then chronicle the evolution of the table-text genre and the impacts of its changing role on the discipline of Sanskrit jyotiṣa. There are also three appendices: one inventories all the identified individual works in the genre currently known to the authors; one provides reference information about the details of all the notational, calendric, astronomical, and other classification systems invoked in the study; and one serves as a glossary of the relevant Sanskrit terms.
- Reviews
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“The book is rich in various technical details from mathematical astronomy that serious students and researchers would benefit from. There is nevertheless a good deal of material that would be accessible to a wider class of readers. … The book under review will no doubt inspire further studies on the topic, serving in particular as a source of technical support for them, and thereby expand the horizons of the topic.” (S. G. Dani, Mathematical Reviews, April, 2020)
“The authors and the publisher are to be congratulated for bringing to the market and our reference shelves a thorough, well-organized, deeply-researched, and beautifully presented book. … I am by no means qualified to comment on the particulars of the authors’ analyses of the manuscripts they examined. I can say that I enjoyed reading the book and that it broadened my thinking about what mathematics is and what mathematicians do.” (Scott Guthery, MAA Reviews, August 24, 2019)
- Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Introduction
Pages 1-36
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Content and classification of table texts
Pages 37-69
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Table-text manuscripts
Pages 71-94
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Elements of table texts
Pages 95-187
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The evolution of the table-text genre
Pages 189-241
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Sanskrit Astronomical Tables
- Authors
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- Clemency Montelle
- Kim Plofker
- Series Title
- Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences
- Copyright
- 2018
- Publisher
- Springer International Publishing
- Copyright Holder
- Springer Nature Switzerland AG
- eBook ISBN
- 978-3-319-97037-0
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-319-97037-0
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-3-319-97036-3
- Series ISSN
- 2196-8810
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- X, 308
- Number of Illustrations
- 85 b/w illustrations, 55 illustrations in colour
- Topics