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I heard an interesting talk on algorithms in ancient Indian mathematics. I was amazed by the ingenuity of those days' mathematicians. And they never wrote it down in symbols!! Everything was written in Shlokas and verses. For eg. the speaker figured out for us how they expressed the concept of mods (|A-B|) in words (sanskrit) as the difference between A and B the order of A and B being immaterial. The full theorem was in 4 lines **. He spoke of so many famous mathematical theorems which were independently discovered by Indians long before the west did***. And the way they have been derived is incredible. The value of sqrt(2) and pi were known to good accuracy in those days!
And I never thought before how much astrology depends on science especially astronomy. Ok maybe now the astrologers just follow set rules and formulae and calculate planetary positions, but someone has derived all that in the first place, and for that they needed astronomy and all this was worked out!!
Someone**** in the audience said "its said that in India nothing ever dies" So maybe these sciences are worked out the Indian way even now in some place.
A very enlightening talk and well spent 2 hours.
Chennai police have been given flashy white cars NYPD style with sirens lights etc and they were seen parading up and down with loud sirens two days back. Like kids roaming with their new bikes :-D Well the sirens were louder than the ambulance sirens and thats a cause for worry too.
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*back again :-D
** This reminded me of my sanskrit learning days. All I remember now is Aham gacchaami. twam gacchati/si. and kukuraha :-D He he see its very important to learn the swear words in every language. Atleast if one does get abused god forbid, one should know wat one has been called :-D
*** Why dont we lay our claim to all that? We Indians are never assertive enough or maybe sometimes we just dont care.
**** Aarghh its so difficult not mentioning names. This audience member always speaks brilliantly and I always look fwd to his insights in discussions. Im more of a listener than a speaker.
***** I love this Bartimeus style of putting thoughts as footnotes :-D
5 comments:
Hey, who was the speaker ? Do you remember his/her name ?
Lot of things on old indian mathematics is given in
this website which u might have seen.
You might have heard a talk by Sriram
(LBs husband) on this sometime back.
Also see:
biography of Parameswara
And "Nilakantha"'s biography there.
Looks like they had derived series expansion of Sin, Cos and Tan, which is nothing but a version of Taylor expansion which we use every day
In astrology they might have used a bit of astronomy (mostly observational! -- i mean no solving of kepler problem!). But I dont believe in any of the astrological predictions. Prediction part of astrology is bull.
I heard dr. sriram's talk only yday ranjith :-D When did he speak on this before?
This was the first time I got to know abt Indian mathematics.. we had awesome ancestors na!!
:-D
regarding astrology, all they needed was the planetary positions and so they it seems devised a way to calculate that. He said predicting moon's position reqs some 1600 terms currently and the mathematicians of those days predicted the position using their own means pretty accurately. its strange how a very unscientific stream like astrology motivated ppl to venture into astronomy.
Very useful links Ranjith
thanks :)
chennai PD like NYPD... kewl :-p... i can just see the traffic policeman who stands near my house trying to get his CONSIDERABLE bulk in to a fancy car...
I am still reading the first part of the B trilogy... some how never find time to read it :-(
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