Mathematics: India's gift to the modern world

By - Sanjay Triguni

A.L. Basham (late), an Australian by birth, Indian Historian by profession, states that "The debt of the Western world to India in this respect ( mathematics ) cannot be overestimated. Most of the great discoveries and inventions of which Europe is so proud would have been impossible without a developed system of mathematics, and this in turn would have been impossible if Europe had been shackled by the unwieldy system of Roman numerals. The unknown man who devised the new system was, from the world's point of view, after the Buddha, the most important son of India. His achievement, though easily taken for granted,was the work of an analytical mind of the first order, and he deserves much more honor than he has so far received."

Why did so many inventions take place in the last 200 years, why suddenly science leaped ahead without bounds? It all happenned in 200 years. Were the humans suddenly waking up? Having a brain lift not seen in thousands of years of civilization.

No sir, the brain was working before that and science had made tremendous progress, especially in ancient lands, where civilization had surfaced first, where man first learned to crop and eat and not kill and eat, where most "modern" sciences were born.

Is it a coincidence that European countries made great advances after they colonized countries like India. In old British and German libraries lie thousands of rare ancient Indian books.Why?

Karl Marx, the great German philosopher mastered Sanskrit, so did a lot of Colonial scientists who were in India. Around the time of Columbus (1400 AD), the Europeans not only came to India for trade but also to take back a lot of knowledge.Before that Europe had links with India through Arabia. Many still feel that "numerals" are a gift of Arabia..... this is when  Arabs themselves learned it from India !!

Arabians  called these numerals as "al arqan al hindu" which literally means"Hindu numbers" ! Similarly Mathematics was termed as "Hidisat" meaning  "Hindu art"!

Coming back to Industrial revolution. At the time of the revolution  India was a slave  for more than thousand years. Were Indians  flourishing under the Brits? Were they advancing their arts & sciences under the tyrranical rule of the Mughals?

No sir, they were busy saving their behinds! But for our numbers and grit we would have become a few "Hindu reservation parks" in some remote areas of India, and some other race would have been ruling there!

There is an interesting story about the birth of plastic surgery. It is taken from the Britsh Journal of Medicine (or a similar authoritative British source), published almost hundred years back.

A man in Tipu Sultans rule is punished - his ear is cut off and he is kicked out of the state. Later this "earless" man is found in Pune  by a British doctor but with his ear back!  This "ear" man leads the British surgeon to an Ayurvedic physician. The Britisher wants to learn the art. On insistance he is taken as a deciple. The Brit learns sanskrit etc. etc. Finally he learns the science and goes back to England and publishes his work. Guess who is known to the world as the father of plastic surgery!

Very recently IEEE has accepted in  principle that the radio was invented by Professor Jagadish Bose and not Marconi. This "stealing" became visible because it happened recently. But we have been robbed of our knowledge for centuries! When the seven story library at Nalanda University in Bihar was burnt by the Mughals, more than 1000 years ago,  they say it smoked for months!

How many books do you think that library had? What was in those books? Nalanda was a full fledged university and even the admission there was on basis of merit!  Why did the Greeks, Mongols, Turks, Muslim, British, Dutch, French, Spanish... want to come to India?  To trade or loot. Why do we come to the US today? So many in the world wants to come here? Do I hear money, knowledge/education. That's about it.

Why is Britain rich and India poor? 200 years of sucking. A country as large as India paying taxes to a country the size of UP? For 200 years!  They came to Bengal first and it became the center for their trade(?). Bengal remains one of the poorest states in India.

That is what they all wanted from a very rich and educated India for centuries. We had gold, silver, precious stones, wheat, cotton,... We had universities, education, knowledge, science,... Most of these foriegners first came to India on the pretext of trade and then tried to loot and rule. India even traded with Romans and Greeks 2000 years ago !!

Indians were a major supplier of food to them. Ports in Gujarat were major trade points / ports. There was a road from Pataliputra (Patna) to Rome even before Alexander tried to invade India !  A greek ambassador,Meagasthenese, resided in Pataliputra. And from his writings we find that Pataliputra was as glorious as Rome and in some ways superior. Has anyone in the western world heard the name of Pataliputra.. have they heard the name Rome !!! Even Indians are not aware of this.

Acheivements, solid, on paper scientific acheivements of Indians? Lets see Mathematics. Mathematics was born in Indus River valley civilization. In vedas it is referred as the "Shulba Sutra". Instruments used for Geometric calculations have been discovered here. We are talking of about 4500-5000 years back- about 3000 years before Christ was born, about 4000 years before Muslim invaders came to India, and about 5000 years before Europe's Industiral revolution!

Before 500 BC (Gautam Buddha) Pythagorous theorom was defined in India, and it is documented, many centuries before Mr. Pythagorous. Why is it called Pythagorous theorom?

According to an respected western historian, Needham,  "Future research on the history of science and technology in Asia will in fact reveal that the achievements of these peoples contribute far more in all pre-Renaissance periods to the development of world science than has yet been realized." At the time of Euphrate and Nile civilizations Indians had developed the decimal system.

Aryabhatta (600 AD), a mathematician and astronomer introduced sines. According to A.L.Basham, in his masterpeice work, The Wonder That Was India, "Medieval Indian mathematicians, such as Brahmagupta (seventh century), Mahavira (ninth century), and Bhaskara (twelfth century), made several discoveries which in Europe were not known until the Renaissance or later. They understood the importance of positive and negative quantities, evolved sound systems of extracting square and cube roots, and could solve quadratic and certain types of indeterminate equations."6 Mahavira's most noteworthy contribution is his treatment of fractions for the first time and his rule for dividing one fraction by another, which did not appear in Europe until the 16th century.

The Indians were the first to classify and make a detailed study of equations. Thus they may be said to have given birth to the modern science of  algebra. Bhaskaracharya, worked on trigonometry ,algebra, calculus and he proposed solutions to problems which were not discovered in Europe until 1700 AD. His work came 500 years before Newton!! Who is given the credit?

Indians gave the world the concept of "zero" too. In the 14th century, Madhava, from south India, developed a power series for the arc tangent function, apparently without the use of  calculus, allowing the calculation of to any number of decimal places (since arctan 1 = /4). Whether he accomplished this by inventing a system as good as calculus or without the aid of calculus; either way it is astonishing.

By the fifteenth century  use of the new mathematical concepts from India had spread all over Europe to Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, among others. Let us not forget the legendary Ramanujam..   who may be considered the  most brilliant mathematician of this century. What is Vedic mathematics?  It is a way of solving complex mathematical problems in one's head, and very quickly. "Sutras" or certain hymns are memorized and when applied to problems give instant solutions.

For example, here is a sanskrit sutra, about Lord Krishna. "gopi bhagya madhuvrata srngiso dadhi sandhiga khala jivita khatava gala hala rasandara"  It is also a very easy way to remember the value of "pi"!! To upto 31 decimals!  It equates to (by applying the verse in certain way) : 0.31415926535897932384626433832792 this equals pi/10    !!