Comments on: Op-Ed in Mail Today: Kerala Astronomers and Eurocentrism

By: kaangeya

kaangeya — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 06:54:39 +0000

JK,

Canisius College offers this program on the Kerala Mathematics School thanks to Prof.Sarada Rajeev of the Dept of Physics, University of Rochester. He’s such a well known physicist that I shan’t waste bandwidth posting links to his pages. Amazing stuff, read it some time.

By: jk

jk — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:38:03 +0000

anand, real player refuses to play that file.

By: Mumbai

Mumbai — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:43:28 +0000

The history of this world is as viewed by the Europeans. It’s not from any other person’s point of view.

There were many famous Persian astronomers and scientists and it is believed that a lot of European scientists derived their work from them.

By: Anand

Anand — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:10:55 +0000

JK: This more-than-two-yr-old episode of IOT discussed Indian Maths, including a section on the Kerala School http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20061214.shtml

By: froginthewell

froginthewell — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:46:40 +0000

Oops – I meant to say that the resonance article had the proof ( see page 5 onwards ) given by Nilakantha for that series – the proof is quite ingenious, and is certainly not something one would expect even a top-scoring-but-non-genius high school student to figure out himself/herself. Though he did not have calculus at his disposal, he broke the circumference into several small arcs, used similar triangles etc. to approximate the length of each part, and took limit as the sizes of the subdivision arcs tend to zero!

By: froginthewell

froginthewell — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:42:59 +0000

Nice article, JK. I had received the email from Ranjith too but of course didn't have any avenue to give it much publicity. BTW some links : (i) There is some controversy regarding whether Aryabhatta or some previous person had a heliocentric approach. (ii) here is a page from this excellent British site on the history of mathematics. They have even put up a book about "redressing" the biased treatment Indian mathematics has received. (iii) Resonance magazine, published by Indian Academy of Sciences had published this article which has a proof of the Gregory-Nilakantha series for \pi ( without a rigorous treatment of the limit, though - but I am not sure if even Euler treated limits rigorously ).

By: vinay

vinay — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 07:14:01 +0000

You can find more information on Indian Astronomy at http://www.samanvaya.com/dharampal/
Dharampal has studied many British public archives and gave us a comprehensive picture of Astronomy and other advances in science and Technology in his 5 Volume work “Dharampal’s Collected Writings”