The Hindus were not so successful in geometry. In the measurement and construction of altars the priests formulated the Pythagorean theorem (by which the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other sides) several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Aryabhata, probably influenced by the Greeks, found the area of a triangle, a trapezium and a circle, and calculated the value of π (the relation of diameter to circumference in a circle) at 3.1416—a figure not equaled in accuracy until the days of Purbach (1423-61) in Europe. Bhaskara crudely anticipated the differential calculus, Aryabhata drew up a table of sines, and the Surya Siddhanta provided a system of trigonometry more advanced than anything known to the Greeks.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The Hindus were not so successful in geometry. In the measurement and construction of altars the priests formulated the Pythagorean theorem (by which the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other sides) several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Aryabhata, probably influenced by the Greeks, found the area of a triangle, a trapezium and a circle, and calculated the value of π (the relation of diameter to circumference in a circle) at 3.1416—a figure not equaled in accuracy until the days of Purbach (1423-61) in Europe. Bhaskara crudely anticipated the differential calculus, Aryabhata drew up a table of sines, and the Surya Siddhanta provided a system of trigonometry more advanced than anything known to the Greeks." in the context of "Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage : India and Her Neighbors." to mean that wisdom is timeless.