Page:Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata, English translation.djvu/38

8 unwieldy numbers in verse in a very brief form. The alphabetical notation is employed only in the Dasagitika. In other parts of the treatise, where only a few numbers of small size occur, the ordinary words which denote the numbers are employed.

As an illustration of Aryabhata's alphabetical notation take the number of the revolutions of the Moon in a yuga (I, 1), which is expressed by the word. cayagiyinusuchlr. Taken syllable by syllable this gives the numbers 6 and 30 and 300 and 3,000 and 50,000 and 700,000 and 7,000,000 and 50,000,000. That is to say, 57,753,336. It happens here that the digits are given in order from right to left, but they may be given in reverse order or in any order which will make the syllables fit into the meter. It is hard to believe that such a descriptive alphabetical notation was not based on a place-value notation.

This stanza, as being a technical paribhasa stanza which indicates the system of notation employed in the Dasagitika, is not counted. The invocation and the colophon are not counted. There is no good reason why the thirteen stanzas should not have been named Dasagitika (as they are named by Aryabhata himself in stanza C) from the ten central stanzas in Giti meter which give the astronomical elements of the system. The discrepancy offers no firm support to the contention of Kaye that this stanza is a later addition. The manuscript referred to by Kaye as containing fifteen instead of thirteen stanzas is doubtless