Vedic Mathematics -- 1 At the outset I salute Sri Kosla Vepa Ph.D for his extensive and enormous research with all his commitment dedication and devotion for this great country, its culture,tradition and for those great people who never mind for their personal name and fame but contributed every thing they know to the mankind without any reciprocation. Uncovering the scope of Ancient Indian Mathematics faces a twofold difficulty. To determine who discovered what we must have an accurate idea of the chronology of Ancient India. This has been made doubly difficult by the faulty dating of Indian Historical events by Sir William Jones, who practically invented the fields of linguistics and philology if for a moment we discount the contributions of Panini (Ashtadhyayi)and Yaska (Nirukta) a couple of millennia before him . Sir William, who was reputed to be an accomplished linguist, was nevertheless totally ignorant of Sanskrit when he arrived in India and proceeded in short order to decipher the entire history of India from his own meager understanding of the language, In the process he brushed aside the conventional history as known and memorized by Sanskrit pundits for hundreds of years and as recorded in the Puranas and invented a brand new timeline for India which was not only egregiously wrong but hopelessly scrambled up the sequence of events and personalities. See for instance my chronicle on the extent of the damage caused by Sir William and his cohorts in my essay on the South Asia File . It is not clear whether this error was one caused by inadequate knowledge of language or one due to deliberate falsification of records. It is horrific to think that a scholar of the stature of sir William would resort to skullduggery merely to satisfy his preconceived notions of the antiquity of Indic contributions to the sum of human knowledge. Hence we will assume Napoleon’s dictum was at play here and that we should attribute not to malice that which can be explained by sheer incompetence. This mistake has been compounded over the intervening decades by a succession of British historians, who intent on reassuring themselves of their racial superiority, refused to acknowledge the antiquity of India, merely because ‘it could not possibly be’. When once they discovered the antiquity of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Babylon, every attempt was made not to disturb the notion that the Tigris Euphrates river valley was the cradle of civilization. The Wikipedia section on Indian Mathematics says the following; Unfortunately, Indian contributions have not been given due acknowledgement in modern history, with many discoveries/inventions by Indian mathematicians now attributed to their western counterparts, due to Eurocentrism. The historian Florian Cajori, one of the most celebrated historians of mathematics in the early 20th century, suggested that Diophantus, the father of Greek algebra, got the first algebraic knowledge from India. This theory is supported by evidence of continuous contact between India and the Hellenistic world from the late 4th century BC, and earlier evidence that the eminent Greek mathematician Pythagoras visited India, which further throws open the Eurocentric ideal. More recently, evidence has been unearthed that reveals that the foundations of calculus were laid in India, at the Kerala School. Some allege that calculus and other mathematics of India were transmitted to Europe through the trade route from Kerala by traders and Jesuit missionaries. Kerala was in continuous contact with China, Arabia, and from around 1500, Europe as well, thus transmission would have Furthermore, we cannot discuss Vedic mathematics without discussing Babylonian and Greek Mathematics to give it the scaffolding and context. We will devote some attention to these developments to put the Indic contribution in its proper context However in recent years, there has been greater international recognition of the scope and breadth of the Ancient Indic contribution to the sum of human knowledge especially in some fields of science and technology such as Mathematics and Medicine. Typical of this new stance is the following excerpt by researchers at St. Andrews in Scotland. An overview of Indian mathematics It is without doubt that mathematics today owes a huge debt to the outstanding contributions made by Indian mathematicians over many hundreds of years. What is quite surprising is that there has been a reluctance to recognize this and one has to conclude that many famous historians of mathematics found what they expected to find, or perhaps even what they hoped to find, rather than to realize what was so clear in front of them. We shall examine the contributions of Indian mathematics in this article, but before looking at this contribution in more detail we should say clearly that the huge debt is the beautiful number system invented by the Indians on which much of mathematical development has rested. Laplace put this with great clarity:- The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius. We shall look briefly at the Indian development of the place-value decimal system of numbers later in this article and in somewhat more detail in the separate article Indian numerals. First, however, we go back to the first evidence of mathematics developing in India. Histories of Indian mathematics used to begin by describing the geometry contained in the Sulvasutras but research into the history of Indian mathematics has shown that the essentials of this geometry were older being contained in the altar constructions described in the Vedic mythology text the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Taittiriya Samhita. Also it has been shown that the study of mathematical astronomy in India goes back to at least the third millennium BC and mathematics and geometry must have existed to support this study in these ancient times. Equally exhaustive in its treatment is the Wiki encyclopedia, where in general the dates are still suspect.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 07:04:12 +0000
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