These were also the centuries in which ancient India’s scientific tradition began to blossom. Details are difficult to trace, but by the first century after Christ, astronomy, arithmetic, algebra, logic, linguistics, surgery, medicine, and a psychology of personality were all well developed. The encounter between India and Greece when Alexander the Great reached the Indus river, 326 B.C., invites comparison between these two civilizations and gives us in the West a familiar benchmark. India, with its decimal system and the potent creation of zero, dominated mathematics as Greece did geometry,
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