Vedic Mathematics
https://ramamohanraocheruku.blogspot.com/2020/12/vedic-mathematics-it-requires-little.html
It requires a little patience and concern for the motherland, for
readers to go through this lengthy article. It is imperative on our part to
know the greatness of our ancestors who made our heads with all pride and
vanity. It is their rich contribution to the mathematical world to have a
breakthrough in several vital areas of mathematics.
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 everything 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 so called 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.
Swasthi.
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