IMPUDENCE TO OUR GREAT MATHEMATICIANS

IMPUDENCE TO OUR GREAT MATHEMATICIANS 

At the outset I express my heartiest gratitude to Dr.  Kosla Vepa Ph.D, a dedicated researcher on Indic Studies and people who come across and follow his works have to be indebted to him for his devotion commitment to bring to light the great people of this great land which is the first piece of land given birth to mankind, which was originally named as Ajanabha, and later on as Bharatha Khanda named after Bharata who is neither one of the brothers of Rama nor the son of Dushyntha and Shakuntala.

 Back to the topic, in his own words Dr.  Kosla Vepa says '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.'

 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 Apollonious.

 Dr. Kosla Vepa adds '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.'

The second difficulty was the Eurocentricity (a euphemism  for a clearly racist attitude) of European mathematicians, who refused to appreciate the full scope of the Indic contributions and insisted on giving greater credit to Greece and later to Babylonian mathematics rather than recognize Indic and Vedic mathematics on its own merits. If this was indeed a surprise revelation, I fail to see the irony, when a similar Eurocentricity was exhibited towards the antiquity of the Vedic people themselves.

This is only a prelude to my mental agony related to the impudence shown to our ancient highly genius people. I will put a comma here with an urge to the youth to seriously take up the subject and its history to keep the Eurocentrics to wind-up their History lessons being taught to us.

Renowned mathematician L Gurjar states that the Bakshali manuscript is the:

…Capstone of the advance of mathematics from the Vedic age up to that period…

Although, as much work was lost between ‘periods’, we cannot fully gauge continuity of progress and it is possible the composer(s) of the Bakhshali manuscript were not fully aware of earlier works and had to start from ‘scratch’. This would make the work an even more remarkable achievement.

The arithmetic contained within the work is of such a high quality that it has been suggested:

…In fact [the] Greeks [are] indebted to India for much of the developments in Arithmetic…

L Gurjar states that the Bakshali manuscript is the:

…Capstone of the advance of mathematics from the Vedic age up to that period…

Although, as much work was lost between ‘periods’, we cannot fully gauge continuity of progress and it is possible the composer(s) of the Bakhshali manuscript were not fully aware of earlier works and had to start from ‘scratch’. This would make the work an even more remarkable achievement.

The arithmetic contained within the work is of such a high quality that it has been suggested:

…In fact [the] Greeks [are] indebted to India for much of the developments in Arithmetic…

By the end of the 2nd century AD mathematics in India had attained a considerable stature, and had become divorced from purely practical and religious requirements, (although it is worth noting that over the next 1000 years the majority of mathematical developments occurred within works on astronomy).

The topics of algebra, arithmetic and geometry had developed significantly and it is widely thought that the decimal place value system of notation had been (generally) perfected by 200 AD, the consequence of which was far reaching.