Delire, Jean-Michel. Les mathématiques de l’autel védique. Le Baudhāyana Śulbasūtra et son commentaire Śulbadīpikā
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The work under review is devoted to the translation from Sanskrit into French of a late commentary on an ancient Indian mathematical text, the Baudhāyana Śulvasūtra 1 (BŚl).This text is dated ca 800-400 bc. 2 It opens with a discourse on geometry, possibly the earliest mathematical discourse 3 from India still extant.It continues with applications to the building of structures of very specific shapes required for 'solemn' ritual purposes, by arranging and stacking bricks according to elaborate rules: these are the Vedic altar(s) of the title.There are mathematical constraints on the shapes of the bricks, on the overall shape of the structures, on the number of bricks and the total area that they cover, and on the relation between consecutive layers.The area-constraint in particular requires the elaborate tools described in the opening discourse.Among Indian texts of the same class, BŚl is the most complete and systematic, and in it we recognize ideas that were developed in later Indian mathematics.P.-S.Filliozat states in his preface that '[n]o text, in the immense mathematical 1 Also spelled 'Śulbasūtra'.Thibaut's sectioning of the text into three parts will be used, following established usage. 2 For the arguments, see the introduction of Sen and Bag 1983.We give another, possibly new, argument for relative dating in note 22, p. 126 below.3 Constructions are prescribed in earlier Indian texts, but they do not seem to have been woven into a connected discourse specifically devoted to geometry, emphasizing mathematical coherence and generality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.018 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".