An Indian Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge has finally solved a  Sanskrit grammatical problem that has baffled scholars since the 5th century BC.

27-year-old Rishi Atul Rajpopat, reportedly decoded a text written by the Sanskrit language master Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around two-and-a-half-thousand years ago, according to a report by BBC.

• Notably, Mr Rajpopat, is a PhD student at the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in St. John's College, Cambridge.
• According to Independent, Panini taught a "metarule" which is traditionally interpreted by scholars as meaning: "in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar's serial order wins". However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results.
• This traditional interpretation of the metarule was rejected by Rajpopat with the argument that Panini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side. He concluded that Panini's "language machine" produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions.