Agathe Keller

Ordering Operations in Square Root Extractions, Analyzing Some Early Medieval Sanskrit Mathematical Texts with the Help of Speech Act Theory

Procedures for extracting square roots written in Sanskrit in two treatises and their commentaries from the fifth to the twelfth centuries are explored with the help of Textology and Speech Act Theory. An analysis of the number and order of the steps presented in these texts is used to show that their aims were not limited to only describing how to carry out the algorithm. The intentions of authors of these Sanskrit mathematical texts are questioned by taking into account the expressivity of relationships established between the world and the text.1