A History of Mathematics/Middle Ages
MIDDLE AGES.
THE HINDOOS.
The first people who distinguished themselves in mathematical research, after the time of the ancient Greeks, belonged, like them, to the Aryan race. It was, however, not a European, but an Asiatic nation, and had its seat in far-off India.
Unlike the Greek, Indian society was fixed into castes. The only castes enjoying the privilege and leisure for advanced study and thinking were the Brahmins, whose prime business was religion and philosophy, and the Kshatriyas, who attended to war and government.
Of the development of Hindoo mathematics we know but little. A few manuscripts bear testimony that the Indians had climbed to a lofty height, but their path of ascent is no longer traceable. It would seem that Greek mathematics grew up under more favourable conditions than the Hindoo, for in Greece it attained an independent existence, and was studied for its own sake, while Hindoo mathematics always remained merely a servant to astronomy. Furthermore, in Greece mathematics was a science of the people, free to be cultivated by all who had a liking for it; in India, as in Egypt, it was in the hands chiefly of the priests. Again, the Indians were in the habit of putting into verse all mathematical results they obtained, and of clothing them in obscure and mystic language,