my_immig_acct
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An interesting article not written by an Indian. Our history text books still say that we learned numbers from Arabians and blah blah. If you write true history, the so called secularists will brand it as communalization. This is nothing but systematic destruction of ones own identity. With the bunch of people in the current Indian govt, it is not too long before we forget about our past and loose our identity.
It's a long read, but you will certainly enjoy it. I couldn't post the entire article. The URL is
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Indian_mathematics.html
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
======================================================
It is without doubt that mathematics today owes a huge debt to the outstanding contributions made by Indian mathematicians over many hundreds of years. What is quite surprising is that there has been a reluctance to recognise this and one has to conclude that many famous historians of mathematics found what they expected to find, or perhaps even what they hoped to find, rather than to realise what was so clear in front of them.
We shall examine the contributions of Indian mathematics in this article, but before looking at this contribution in more detail we should say clearly that the "huge debt" is the beautiful number system invented by the Indians on which much of mathematical development has rested. Laplace put this with great clarity:-
The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. the importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.
and so it goes.............
It's a long read, but you will certainly enjoy it. I couldn't post the entire article. The URL is
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Indian_mathematics.html
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
======================================================
It is without doubt that mathematics today owes a huge debt to the outstanding contributions made by Indian mathematicians over many hundreds of years. What is quite surprising is that there has been a reluctance to recognise this and one has to conclude that many famous historians of mathematics found what they expected to find, or perhaps even what they hoped to find, rather than to realise what was so clear in front of them.
We shall examine the contributions of Indian mathematics in this article, but before looking at this contribution in more detail we should say clearly that the "huge debt" is the beautiful number system invented by the Indians on which much of mathematical development has rested. Laplace put this with great clarity:-
The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. the importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.
and so it goes.............