Eugène Jacquet and his Pioneering Study of Indian Numerical Notations
Abstract
Eugène Jacquet was one of the earliest European scholars who made a comprehensive study of all the systems of numerical notation which were prevalent in India. In a pioneering paper published in 1830 he put together the scattered pieces of information then available in Europe and built up a large corpus of symbolic words employed in Sanskrit astronomical texts to represent numbers. He was one of the first scholars to realise that this system of word numerals used in Sanskrit texts spread outside India and was to be found in Tibet and Java. Jacquet also discussed the two variants of alphabetic notation employed in astronomical texts, viz. the system designed and employed by Aryabhata in his Aryabhatia and the more widely used Katapayadi alphabetic notation. The present article, after a brief outline of Jacquet’s life, introduces Jacquet’s paper on the numerical notations in India.
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