Pingala's prosody: binary patterns and combinatorics
Prosodia de Pingala: patrones binarios y combinatoria
- Date
- c. 200 BCE · confidence low
- Place
- Northern India, India
- Credited to
- Pingala
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
The Chandahsastra classifies poetic metres as sequences of short and long syllables and gives rules for enumerating them, numbering them and counting how many there are of each type. It is equivalent to a binary representation and to binomial coefficients.
Its date ranges from the 5th to the 2nd century BCE. The explicit 'Pascal's triangle' appears in Halayudha's commentary (10th century), not in Pingala; the parallel with Leibniz's binary system is structural, not notational.
What it led to
- Indian combinatorics (Virahanka, Hemachandra, Mahavira)
- meru prastara triangle explained by Halayudha (10th century)