http://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-brilliant-mathematician-whom-time-forgot/65912
Long
before Sir Isaac Newton, Pierre de Fermat, Gottfried Leibniz or the
rest of the crew credited with the development of calculus, an
astronomer and mathematician named Jyesthadeva put ink to palm leaves to
record the mathematics of his teachers and possibly some of his own.
In
a small town in southern India in the 1500s, Jyesthadeva penned
concepts important to developing a calculus system, and he did so in
complete proofs that demonstrated infinite series expansions of
trigonometric functions and gave precise approximations for complex
calculations. “Calculus and everything derived from it depends to some
extent on these concepts of infinitesimals and infinite series,” says
Kim Plofker, author of Mathematics in India. By way of
comparison, it wasn’t until the 1660s in Europe that a Westerner named
James Gregory was able to independently do the same proof.
"I have ascertained beyond a doubt that the invention of infinite series of these forms has originated in Malabar."- Charles M. Whish
The text, called the Yuktibhasa, is broken into 15 chapters and spans hundreds of pages of proofs and commentary. It was a compilation of a century-plus of Indian mathematics developed by the Kerala school, led by mathematician Madhava
of Sangamagrama in the 14th century. Most of Madhava’s work would have
been lost if not for the writings of pupils like Jyesthadeva, who
recorded everything in Dravidian, the hyper-localized dialect of
Malayalam. One theory is that Jyesthadeva wasn’t fluent in Sanskrit or he was helping others who weren’t.
By
the 16th century, the school was on the wane, which might have been
Jyesthadeva’s impetus for writing down the proofs that had been passed
from pupil to pupil orally for 200 years — the Yuktibhasa may have been his way of preserving that information.
There
are a few theories as to why the school faded. Perhaps a dynasty change
led to funding cuts. Or perhaps it was because the practical use of
mathematics was primarily for astronomy, and once the tables had been
made accurate to the 11th decimal place, there was no more need for
mathematicians. But whatever the cause, “by the 1700s, almost no one is
reading or copying [the Kerala school] texts anymore,” says Homer White,
professor of mathematics at Georgetown College.
While some historians have speculated that Jesuits traveling between India and Europe brought the Yuktibhasa back
to Europe and that it served to inspire European calculus, most aren’t
convinced. “There is no reason to believe that our use of these ideas
was directly descended from or influenced by the Kerala school,” Plofker
says. Located between the Western Ghats mountain chain and the Arabian
Sea, Kerala was perfectly situated to have its own culture. It wasn’t
completely isolated — Kerala was a hub for pepper production and export —
but the school was “quite removed from that trading nexus,” Plofker
says, which suggests that ideas from the Yuktibhasa were unlikely to have spread across the ocean.
After
the school fizzled out, it took more than 100 years before the work was
studied by a Western audience. British colonists in India began
studying the culture in the 1700s; in the 1830s, Charles M. Whish
published a paper about the Yuktibhasa in the journal Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
Whish was a busy fellow, serving in the East India Company in South
Malabar, and then, after a few years, as a criminal judge. But he found
time to study Indian texts on the side, and before he died at the age of
38, Whish shared with a European audience how the Yuktibhasa had complete proofs.
This
was an important “discovery.” Prior to Whish’s translation, Europeans
commenting on Indian mathematics denied that the subcontinent had
invented its own concepts. John Warren, another East India Company employee,
wrote that “a Native Astronomer who was a perfect stranger to European
Geometry” could demonstrate the infinite series, but the astronomer
could not explain how he knew it to be true — the proof, in other words,
was missing. “The Hindus never invented the series; it was communicated
with many others, by Europeans, to some learned Natives in modern
times,” Warren wrote, quoting George Hyne, also of the East India
Company. Whish disagreed, but the prevailing notion, as Hyne had written
to Warren, was that “the pretensions of the Hindus to such a knowledge
of geometry, is too ridiculous to deserve refutation.”
The Yuktibhasa was
the key to proving Warren wrong. It revealed that the Kerala
mathematicians had not “taken” the logic but had found it themselves and
derived their solution, and had done so far earlier than any European.
Whish wanted to correct the misconception, noting, “I have ascertained
beyond a doubt that the invention of infinite series of these forms has
originated in Malabar” — further proof that history did not have to be
written in English to be true.
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C. M. Whish
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Charles Matthew Whish (1794–1833) was an English civil servant in the Madras Establishment of the East India Company. Whish was the first to bring to the notice of the western mathematical scholarship the achievements of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. Whish wrote in his historical paper:[1] Kerala mathematicians had ... laid the foundation for a complete system of fluxions ... and their works ... abound with fluxional forms and series to be found in no work of foreign countries.[2] Whish was also a linguist and had prepared a grammar and a dictionary of the Malayalam language.[3][4]
C.M. Whish was a collector of palm-leaf manuscripts in Sanskrit and
other languages. After his premature death in 1833 at the age of
thirty-eight years, Whish's brother, J.L. Whish, who was also employed
in the service of East India Company deposited these manuscripts in the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland in July 1836. A catalogue of these manuscripts list 195 items.[5] Though
the manuscripts collected by Whish are not distinguished by great age,
there are many rare and valuable ones among them. Perhaps the most
important of all are the Mahabharata manuscripts which represent a distinct recension of the great epic. These manuscripts were related a wide range of subjects: vedic literature, ancient epic poetry, classical SanskritLiterature, and technical and scientific literature.
He joined the service of East India Company in 1812 as Register of Zillah Court in South Malabar and rose up the judicial ladder to become finally a Criminal Judge at Cuddapah.[6] Cuddapah
Town Cemetery had a tomb in the name of C.M. Whish with the inscription
"Sacred to the memory of C.M. Whish, Esquire of the Civil Service, who
departed this life on the 14th April 1833, aged 38 years".[7]
References[edit]
- ^ Charles Whish (1834), "On the Hindu Quadrature of the circle and the infinite series of the proportion of the circumference to the diameter exhibited in the four Sastras, the Tantra Sahgraham, Yucti Bhasha, Carana Padhati and Sadratnamala", Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland) 3 (3): 509–523, doi:10.1017/S0950473700001221, JSTOR 25581775 (This paper has been reproduced as an Appendix in "I.S. Bhanu Murthy (1992). A modern introduction to ancient Indian mathematics. New Delhi: New Age International Publishers. ISBN 81-224-0371-9.")
- ^ J J O'Connor and E F Robertson (November 2000). "An overview of Indian mathematics". School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland. Retrieved 19 December 2009.
- ^ S. Muthiah (18 February 2002). "The college on College Road". The Hindu. Retrieved 19 December 2009.
- ^ Madras Tercentenary Celebration Committee (1939). Madras Tercentenary Commemoration Volume. Asian Educational Services. p. 401.
- ^ Compiled by Dr. M. Winternitz, Professor in the German University of Prague, ed. (1902). A catalogue of south Indian Sanskrit manuscripts : especially those of the Whish collection belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1902). The Royal Asiatic Society. Retrieved 20 December 2009.
- ^ Joseph, George Gheverghese (1995). "Cognitive encounters in India during the age of imperialism". Race & Class 36 (3): 39–56. doi:10.1177/030639689503600303.
- ^ List of European tombs in the district of Cuddapah with inscriptions therein compiled by C.H. Mounsey (PDF). 1893.
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