Does anyone know the history about the pascal triangle?
This is copy pasted from the link listed in the source-list for your convenience. The link gives a lot more information about the Pascal triangle. History The earliest explicit depictions of a triangle of binomial coefficients occur in the 10th century in commentaries on the Chandas Shastra, an ancient Indian book on Sanskrit prosody written by Pingala between the 5th–2nd centuries BC. While Pingala’s work only survives in fragments, the commentator Halayudha, around 975, used the triangle to explain obscure references to Meru-prastaara, the “Staircase of Mount Meru”. It was also realised that the shallow diagonals of the triangle sum to the Fibonacci numbers. The Indian mathematician Bhattotpala (c. 1068) later gives rows 0-16 of the triangle. At around the same time, it was discussed in Persia (Iran) by the mathematician Al-Karaji (953–1029) and the poet-astronomer-mathematician Omar Khayyám (1048-1131); thus the triangle is referred to as the “Khayyam triangle” in Iran. Several theo
