Knuth: 13th-century Sanskrit music scholars were doing computer science before computers
SumitGup · x · 2026-10-24
In an ACM interview, Donald Knuth recalled reading translations of 13th-century Sanskrit works and said some Indian musicians "would have been computer scientists if they were living today."
His history of combinatorics credits Sharngadeva's Sangitaratnakara with systematically listing all orderings of a set of notes — plus the crucial dual operation: given an arrangement, find its rank in the list; given a rank, reconstruct the arrangement. The referenced paper adds that Narayana Pandita later gave algorithms to generate permutations in decreasing colexicographic order with rank/unrank, effectively discovering the factorial number system, making him a legitimate founder of combinatorial generation.
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