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Chandas (Pingala), bhāṣā, limits of writing systems to encode Veda chants or mathematics of poetry and music (Update)
The related links prefaced on this post have been updated:
See related posts at links:
Rao, TRN & Kak, Subhash, 1998, Computing science in Ancient India, Lafayette, LA, The Centre fo Advanced Computer Studies, Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana, https://ikashmir.
B. van Nooten notes that Pingala has succeeded in introducing the binary number as a means for classifying metrical patterns.”Instead of giving names to the meters he constructs a prastāra, a ‘bed’, or matrix, in which the laghus and gurus are listed horizontally…The device of the prastāra has to be visualized as an actual table written on a board, or in the dust on the ground. Each horizontal line of the table stands for a line of verse represented as a succession of laghu and guru syllables. Every possible combination of the laghus and gurus is spelled out for a particular meter. Hence there will be separate prastāras for 8-syllabi, for 11-syllabic and 12-syllabic meters. The first line in each will consist of all laghus, the last line of all gurus…He (Pingala) knew how to convert that binary notation to a decimal notation and vice versa. We know of no sources from which he could have drawn his inspiration, so he may well have been the originator of the system…this knowledge was available to and preserved by Sanskrit students of metrics. Unlike the case of the great linguistic discoveries of the Indians which directly influenced and inspired Western linguistics, this discovery of the theory of binary numbers has so far gone unrecorded in the annals of the West.” (van Nooten, B., Binary numbers in Inian Antiquity, in Rao, TRN & Kak, Subhash, opcit., pp. 21-38; this article had appeared in Kluwer Academic Publishers, Journal of Indian Studies 21: 31-50, 1993).
Kak, Subhah, 2000, Yamātārājabhānasalagām, an interesting combinatoric sūtra, in: Indian Journal of History of Sience, 35.2 (2000) 123-127. The note considers the history of a sūtra which describes all combinations of a binary sequence of length 3 in connection with the classification of metres as sequence of laghu and guru syllables.
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/07/srotriya- brahmana-and-oralwritten.html Śrotriya brāhmaṇa and oral/written preservation of the Veda http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/07/were- vedic-people-illiterate-and- did.html Were Vedic people illiterate and did they oppose literacy? A riposte to the canard spread by a Harvard Professor. http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/07/taksat- vak-incised-speech-evidence- of.html Takṣat vāk, ‘incised speech’ -- Evidence of Indus writing of Meluhha language in Ancient Near East (S. Kalyanaraman, July 2013)