A team of Sanskrit scholars at the Kashmir Institute has completed the decipherment of a rare birch-bark manuscript found in a high-altitude cave. The 9th-century text, written in the Sharada script, contains an unknown commentary on the 'Nyaya-Varttika' that employs formal symbolic logic strikingly similar to modern Boolean algebra.
The research, published in Antiquity, argues that the Kashmiri logicians of this period used specific Sanskrit symbols to represent 'null sets' and 'recursive variables' in their philosophical debates. This discovery suggests that ancient Indian logic was significantly more formalized than previously recognized, predating similar developments in Western symbolic logic by nearly a millennium.