Came across a view that Mathematics is totally aesthetic. Beauty in numbers. True. Symmetry, patterns and relationships is what I can think of to elaborate on. As I kept reading, I came across various reminders that many of the mathematical concepts that are attributed to the Western scientists were actually commonly known to several Indian Mathematicians. While our text books read that Indians gave the numerical world the concept of zero and the decimal system, it is not a well known fact that concepts like the Fibonacci numbers, Pascal's Triangle, the value of Pi; why even Trigonometry, Algebra and Calculus had actually originated in India.
This is what I managed to remember,
This is what I managed to remember,
- Aryabhata calculated the value for Pi and gave the world the Zero!
- Bhaskara wrote his mathematical work the Lilavati on Differential Calculus five centuries before Newton and Leibitz (Remember there was a long bitterness between these two over the invention of calculus) . It was written for his daughter and he named it after her. His book Bijaganita was on algebra. He also developed a proof on the Pythagoreas theorem
- Madhava was a Kerala mathematician who also made significant contribution to mathematical analysis or was it Calculus ?
- Panini - a grammarian whose rules of grammar relating transformation and recursion are now the basis of computing and programming
- Pingala, Panini's brother is another mathematician who outlined the ideas behind a numeral system and what we now know to be the Pascal's triangle and Fibonacci sequences.
Curious to know why India had been ignored and denied its due credit, I read on. And I found a site (created by scientists from all over the world) that explained reasons why the the whole mission of the West/Europe to colonize would be defeated if they admitted that India was far ahead even in the centuries B.C. although they found it very difficult to ignore it. Read in more detail here
3 comments:
Yeah...we had mathematical geniuses in India when people in the west were still cringing in caves(well thats an exaggeration), I join you in wondering where we lost it all.
Panini is also some Italian eatery.... soups and sandwiches
Some say that Indians had been great in Science and Maths but couldn't engineer anything inspite of sound understanding of the underlying concepts! Raman effect, Ramanuja's concepts, Bose _ Einstein theory weren't transformed into technologies in India whilst the western world instrumented these ideas and exploited it. The recent A.k.Sood's (IISc Bangalore) discovery is acknowledged as a major breakthrough in science; it was rather sad when one of the prominent Indian scientist remarked 'We(Indians) had understood science better than anyone else, discovered a lot, but have never been able to make it usable for the human kind. Let us try and be the first to make a commercial device out of this discovery atleast..." I just can't understand who should be blamed if India, inspite of having the best computer engineers, biggest army, a huge population, educated public, finest engineers couldn't excel inspite of enormous potential!
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