BY NIRANJAN SHAH
My dear Snehi and Sohan:
In most of the countries of the modern world except India, ancient history does not exist because in addition to ravages of time, the records of ancient history were systematically wiped out in the name of religion. In spite of all the continuous destruction, it is only in India, that a small portion of Vedic literature still exists. Even though mathematics is one Vedic gift of India to the world, there is a common notion among the Indian scholars that it is a sacrilege to question the opinions determined by the European Indologists concerning the contribution of India. The European scholarship has done immeasurable harm to ancient Indian history and mathematical knowledge. All Eurocentric inventions have led to the persistent habit of looking outside India for the origin of everything. This has its roots in one fictitious idea that foreigners have introduced everything really great in ancient India. A number of new books have been written recently, which challenge many imposed assumptions of Eurocentric historians by presenting abundant evidence, literary, archeological, anthropological, and astronomical.
Mathematician D.J. Struik wrote in A Concise History of Mathematics: “Unfortunately, there are no primary sources which can give us a picture of the early development of Greek mathematics. The existing codices are from Christian and Islamic times, which are sparingly supplemented by Egyptian Papyrus notes. For the information about the formative years of Greek mathematics, we must rely entirely on small fragments transmitted by later authors and scattered remarks by philosophers and others not strictly mathematical authors. What we are able to present, is, therefore, largely hypothetical, although somewhat consistent picture of Greek mathematics in its formative years.”
In 1835, G. Thibaut translated a large portion of the Sanskrit Sulva Sutras, which are primarily instruction manuals for geometric construction of buildings and altars. They show that ancient Indians possessed a significant mathematical knowledge. Thibaut did not formulate the clear conclusion that Greeks were not the inventors of geometry, but it was Indians. The Greek scholars, however, saw that this was the message in Thibaut’s paper. They did not like it. The question was, if Indians invented plane geometry, what was to become of “Greek genius?” Realizing the importance of Thibaout’s work M. Cantor began a comparative study of Greek and Indian mathematics.
In 1978, Dr. Abraham Seidenberg presented his famous paper on the origin of mathematics. He argued that the birth of geometry and mathematics had a ritual origin. In this paper on the origin of mathematics, Seidenberg concluded: “Old Babylonia (1700 B.C.) got the theorem of Pythagoras from India or that both Old-Babylonia and India got it from a third source. Now the Sanskrit scholars do not give me a date so far back as 1700 B.C. Therefore, I postulate a pre-Old-Babylonian (i.e. pre-1700 B.C.) source of the kind of geometric rituals we see preserved in the Sulva Sutras, or at least for the mathematics involved in these rituals.” That was before archeological finds disproved the earlier assumptions of a break in Indian civilization in the second millennium B.C.E.; it was this assumption of the Sanskritists that led Seidenberg to postulate a third earlier source. Now with our new knowledge, Seiden-berg’s conclusion of India being the source of the geometric and mathematical knowledge of the ancient world fits in with the new chronology of the texts. According to latest researches of scholars, Baudhayan compiled Sulva Sutras around 3200 B.C.
Dr. Abraham Seidenberg, a professor of mathematics at University of California at Berkley, who retired in 1987, advanced a theory that mathematics arose from a common origin, and was preserved by an oral tradition, and very likely a religious tradition, perhaps one like the one seen in the Indian Sulva Sutras. Dr. Abraham Seidenberg studied at the University of Maryland and was awarded his B.A. in 1937. His doctoral studies in algebra were at Johns Hopkins University, where his research was supervised by Oscar Zariski. After submitting his Ph. D. thesis, Valuation Ideals in Rings of Polynomials in Two Variables, he was awarded his doctorate in 1943. In 1945 Seidenberg was appointed as an instructor in mathematics at the University of California at Berkley. He was promoted rapidly and in 1958 reached the rank of full professor. He retired in 1987 and was made Professor Emeritus at that time. He married writer Ebe Cagli of Ancona, Italy. He was in Milan in the middle of giving a lecture series at the time of his death. Ebe Seidenberg died in a clinic in Rome at the age 87.
Van der Warden’s book, Geometry and Algebra in Ancient Civilizations, takes a similar view. In fact, Van der Warden credits Seidenberg for making him look at the history of mathematics a new way. A. Seidenberg was investigating the question of the origin of mathematics. In his paper, in 1978, he established that the Sulva Sutras were the basis for the mathematics in Egypt, Babylon, and Greece. Thus Seidenberg accomplished by pure rationalization without challenging the existing speculative theories.
Dr. David Gray writes in Science and Mathematics in India: “The study of mathematics in the West has long been characterized by a certain ethnocentric bias, a bias which most often manifests not in explicit racism, but in a tendency toward undermining or eliding the real contributions made by non-Western civilizations. The debt owed by the West to other civilizations, and to India in particular, go back to the earliest epoch of the Western scientific tradition, the age of the classical Greeks, and continued up until the dawn of the modern era, the renaissance, when Europe was awakening from its dark ages.” He concludes by asserting “the role played by India in the development (of the scientific revolution in Europe) is no mere footnote, easily and inconsequentially swept under the rug of Eurocentric bias. To do so is to distort history, and to deny India one of its greatest contributions to world civilization.”
— Grandpa’s blessings