Editor,
Indians have been pioneers in many fields, especially where it involves grey matter. Mathematics is no different. India’s love affair with mathematics is millennia old and forms the very foundation of many scientific inventions and discoveries. These proud facts were passionately acknowledged and eulogized by great thinkers like Francois Voltaire and Pierre-Simon Laplace about three hundred years ago.
Yes, precision and calculation go hand in hand in India. No language is more precise than Sanskrit in expressing anything imaginable without ambiguity. After realizing the depth of Indian treatises, a top American philosopher William James exclaimed, “From the Vedas, we learn the practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are an encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.”
Well, mathematical discoveries were made on Indian soil thousands of years before the Europeans found their so-called breakthroughs. Even after realizing that Indians had long made many mathematical discoveries, they continued to conveniently ignore these facts and used the Roman numeral system, which was incessantly criticized for being inherently clumsy. Al-Khwarizmi, a Persian polymath of the 8th Century and Leonardo Bonacci, an Italian mathematical genius of the 12th Century, are some of the important persons who struggled hard to introduce the Indian system of numbers in European countries.
India’s zero has the power to turn a pauper into a prince and vice versa. The buck doesn’t stop there. The ancient Indian saints also made significant contributions to algebra, trigonometry, algorithm, negative numbers, square root and cube root, to name a few.
In the famous book, ‘The Universal History of Numbers’, eminent French historian of mathematics Georges Ifrah says just that. “A thousand years ahead of Europeans, Indian savants knew that the ZERO and the INFINITY were mutually inverse notions,” Lancelot Thomas Hogben, a British medical statistician and zoologist, seconded Ifrah. “In the whole history of Mathematics, there has been no more REVOLUTIONARY step than the one which the Indians made when they invented the sign 0 for the empty column of the counting frame,” said Hogben.
Leading American historian and author Stanley Wolpert praises the mathematical prowess of India: “Zero, this modest and most valuable of all numerals, is one of the subtle gifts of India to mankind. Our decimal system, place notation, numbers 1 through 9, and the ubiquitous 0, are all major Indian contributions to world science. Without them, our modern world of computer sciences, earth-launched satellites, microchips, and artificial intelligence would have been impossible.” He couldn’t have worded it more precisely.
Indian saints were ingenious, and their contribution to mathematics remains unparalleled. The greatest French mathematician of all time, Pierre Simon de Laplace, was all praise for Indian sages. “It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value, a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us that we ignore its true merit. The idea escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius,” states Laplace.
The ancient seers proposed theories and number systems that laid the foundation of mathematics of modern times. In the book, Surya Siddhanta, written way back in the 5th Century, systems of trigonometry and theorems were explained which were unknown to Europeans till two centuries later.
Many westerners have critically acclaimed Indian mathematicians while doubting their own. French philosopher Francois Voltaire once proclaimed, “It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry. But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmins’ science not been long established in Europe.” Another German scholar, Leopold von Schroeder, remarked, “Nearly all the philosophical and mathematical doctrines attributed to Pythagoras are derived from India.”
India has established its prowess in Mathematics from time immemorial. It has not only inspired westerners but also left an indelible impression on their minds.
Now finally, let’s hear directly from the horse’s mouth – Albert Einstein: “We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discoveries could have been made.” Hope these great words of great Minds zero out our doubt against the intellectual strength of our ancestors.
Yours truly,
Salil Gewali,
Shillong
Voters respect the manifesto
Editor,
Mallikarjun Khadge passed the first litmus test by helping Congress win the assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh which has a tradition of changing governments after every five years. Whatever guarantees the Congress party had promised to the voters paid rich dividends. Let’s take two guarantees – the first is implementation of old pension scheme and second is payment of rupees 1500 to every female above eighteen years. The Congress is in power in two states Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and in both states old pension scheme is implemented and the voters positively responded to this guarantee. The second point of payment to females proved fruitful. It is interesting to note that Mallikarjun Khadge today declared that the same ten guarantees will be implemented in Karnataka assembly elections which will be held in May 2023. The Bharat Jodo Yatra passed through many parts of Karnataka and the results of the assembly elections will prove whether the Yatra made any impact.
The BJP is treating all the above as freebies yet the party has to take such issues seriously otherwise, they can prove costly for the BJP. Now take the performance of Anurag Thakur where all the seats in Hamirpur were captured by Congress! Also, the BJP president could not win in his own State. As per media reports there are chances of their position being downgraded. The same is happening in Delhi too where sitting MPs performed badly. Voters of Delhi punished the BJP for not cleaning the landfills in the past several years. Two other results had left their national imprints; one is the result of Bihar assembly where JDU lost the seat which is a clear signal to the party that voters do not like the frequent change in alignment. The second example is of the Rampur election which had more than fifty percent minority votes but the BJP won the seat with a comfortable margin. This makes it abundantly clear that voters now want development and nothing else. On the basis of what is stated above we can say that a common voter does respect the manifesto/guarantees/appeals of political parties if it is in the larger interest of the common man.
Yours etc.,
Yash Pal Ralhan,
Via email