1.
“India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech,
the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of
tradition. our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of
man are treasured up in India only.” – Mark Twain
2.
“Gravitation was known to the Hindus (Indians) before the birth of Newton.
The system of blood circulation was discovered by them centuries before Harvey
was heard of.” – P. Johnstone
3
“We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no
worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.” – Albert Einstein
4.
It is high
time that the full story of Indian mathematics from Vedic times through 1600
became generally known. I am not minimizing the genius of the Greeks and their
wonderful invention of pure mathematics, but other peoples have been doing math
in different ways, and they have often attained the same goals independently.
Rigorous mathematics in the Greek style should not be seen as the only way to
gain mathematical knowledge. In India, where concrete applications were never
far from theory, justifications were more informal and mostly verbal rather
than written. One should also recall that the European Enlightenment was an
orgy of correct and important but semi rigorous math in which Greek ideals were
forgotten. The recent episodes with deep mathematics flowing from quantum field
and string theory teach us the same lesson: that the muse of mathematics can be
wooed in many different ways and her secrets teased out of her. And so they
were in India … David Mumford
5.
“After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of
Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.” – W. Heisenberg (German Physicist, 1901-1976)
6.
“Our present knowledge of the nervous system fits in so accurately with the
internal description of the human body given in the Vedas (5000 years ago).
Then the question arises whether the Vedas are religious books or books on
anatomy of the nervous system and medicine.” – B G Rele (The Vedic Gods)
7.
"How great is the science which revealed itself in the Sulba, and how
meagre is my intellect! I have aspired to cross the unconquerable ocean in, a
mere raft." ---- B Datta
8.
The Vedic Hindu, in his great quest of the Para-vidya, Satyasya Sa
tyam , made progress in the Apara-Vidya, including the various arts and
sciences, to a considerable extent, and with a completeness which is unparalleled in antiquity." -----B Datta
9.
The Indians have an extremely subtle and penetrating intellect, and when it
comes to arithmetic, geometry and other such advanced disciplines, other ideas
must make way for theirs. "I will omit all discussion of the science of
the Indians, a people not the same as the Syrians; of their subtle discoveries
in astronomy, discoveries that are more ingenious than those of the Greeks and
the Babylonians; and of their valuable methods of calculation which surpass
description."----- (Severus Sebokht in 662 AD) "
10.
"Indeed, if one understands by algebra. the application of
arithmetical operations to complex magnitudes of all sorts, whether rational or
irrational numbers or spacemagnitudes, then the learned Brahmins of Hindostan
are the real inventors of algebra." ----- H Hanke
11.
"The intellectual potentialities of the Indian nation are unlimited
and not many years would perhaps be needed before I ndia can take a worthy
place in world Mathematics." ---(Andre Weil in 1936)
12.
"India has given to antiquity the earliest scientific physicians, and,
according to Sir William Hunter, she has even contributed to modern medical
science by the discovery of various chemicals and by teaching you how to reform
misshapen ears and noses. Even more it has done in mathematics, for algebra,
geometry, astronomy, and the triumph of modern science - mixed mathematics -
were all invented in India, just so much as the ten numerals, the very
cornerstone of all present civilization, were discovered in India, and, are in
reality, sanskrit words." ----Swami Vivekananda
13.
The Hindus solved problems in interest, discount, partnership, alligation,
summation of arithmetical and geometric series, and devised rules for
determining the numbers of combinations and permutations. It may here be added
that chess, the profoundest of all games, had its origin in India."--- F
Cajori
14.
" ... it is remarkable to what extent Indian mathematics enters into
the science of our time. Both the form and the spirit of the arithmetic and
algebra of modern times are essentially Indian. Think of our notation of
numbers, brought to perfection by the Hindus, think of the Indian arithmetical
operations nearly as perfect as our own, think of their elegant algebraical
methods, and then judge whether the Brahmins on the banks of the Ganges are not
entitled to some credit."--- F Cajori
15.
"Incomparably greater progress than in the solution of determinate
equations was made by the Hindus in the treatment of indeterminate equations.
Indeterminate analysis was a subject to which the Hindu mind showed a happy
adaptation." -- F Cajori
16.
"Unfortunately,
some of the most brilliant results in indeterminate analysis, found in the
Hindu works, reached Europe too late to exert the influence they would have
exerted, had they come two or three centuries earlier." ---F Cajori
17.
"As I look back
upon the history of my country, I do not find in the whole world anothercountry
which has done quite so much for the improvement of the human mind. Therefore I
have no words of condemnation for my nation. I tell them, 'You have done well;
only try to do better.' Great things have been done in the past in this land,
and there is both time and room for greater things to be done yet ... Our
ancestors did great things in the past, but we have to grow into a fuller life
and march beyond even their great achievement. " --- Swami Vivekananda
(Complete Works Vol III p.195)
18.
"There is no question of the superiority
of the Hindus over their rivals in the perfection to which they brought the
science. Not only is Aryabhatta superior to Diaphantus (as is shown by his
knowledge of the resolution of equations involving several unknown quantities,
and in general method of resolving all indeterminate problems of at least
the first degree), but he and his successors press hard upon the discoveries of
algebraists who lived almost in our own time!"
-
Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779 - 1859)
19.
It is very important to note that some
2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn
geometry...But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey
had the reputation of the Brahmins' science not been long established in
Europe..."
- Francois Marie Arouet
Voltaire (1694-1774) France's greatest writer and philosopher.
20.
" It is more likely that
Pythagoras was influenced by India than by Egypt. Almost all the theories,
religions, philosophical and mathematical taught by the Pythagoreans, were
known in India in the sixth century B.C., and the Pythagoreans, like the Jains
and the Buddhists, refrained from the destruction of life and eating meat and
regarded certain vegetables such as beans as taboo. "It seems that
the so-called Pythagorean theorem of the quadrature of the hypotenuse was
already known to the Indians in the older Vedic times, and thus before
Pythagoras.”
Prof. H. G. Rawlinson 19th Century, British historian and author
21.
“We owe a lot to the Indians, who
taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could
have been made.” - Albert Einstein
22.
It is certain that the Vedic Indians knew
something of astronomy and that it had a high utilitarian value for them as it
did for all peoples of antiquity. The Vedic priests had to make careful
calculations of times for their rituals and sacrifices, and also had to
determine the time of sowing and harvest. Moreover, astronomical periods played
an important role in Vedic thought for they were successive parts of the ever-returning
cosmic cycle.”- Fritjof Capra (Physicist)
23.
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of
expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value
of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which
appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very
simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our
arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the
grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the
genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of
the greatest men produced by antiquity.”
― Pierre-Simon Laplace
24.
The Indian system of counting is probably the most successful intellectual innovation ever devised by human beings. It has been universally adopted. ...It is the nearest thing we have to a universal language. --- John D. Barrow
- “Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.” --- Julius Robert Oppenheimer
- 35.
- The Bhagavad Gita… is the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue. -- --- Julius Robert Oppenheimer - Inventor of Atom Bomb
- 36.
- A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions ---Carl Sagan
- 37.
- That Hindu astronomical lore about ancient times cannot be based on later back-calculation, was also argued by Playfair’s contemporary, the French astronomer jean-Sylvain Bailly: “The motions of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the [modem] tables of Cassini and Meyer. The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as that discovered by Tycho Brahe - a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also the Arabs. - Jean Sylvain Bally French Astronomer
- 38.
- Most of my ideas & theories are heavily influenced by Vedanta - Erwin Schrödinger
- 25.
- “Hindu cosmology gives a time-scale for the earth and the
universe which is consonant with that of modern scientific cosmology”, as
opposed to the limited Biblical-Quranic cosmology, which was protected against
more far-sighted alternatives by a vigilant religious orthodoxy. ---- Carl Sagan
It is clear how much we owe to this brilliant civilization, and not only in
the field of arithmetic; by opening the way to the generalization of the
concept of the number, the Indian scholars enabled the rapid development of
mathematics and exact sciences. The discoveries of these men doubtless required
much time and imagination and, above all, a great ability for abstract
thinking. These major discoveries took place within an environment which was at
once mystical, philosophical, religious, cosmological, mythological and
metaphysical.- Georges Ifrah.
In the Shulba Sutra appended to Baudhayana’s Shrauta Sutra, mathematical
instructions are given for the construction of Vedic altars. One of its
remarkable contributions is the theorem usually ascribed to Pythagoras, first
for the special case of a square (the form in which it was discovered), then
for the general case of the rectangle: “The diagonal of the rectangle produces
the combined surface which the length and the breadth produce separately.” --- Elst, Koenraad
I shall not now speak of the knowledge of the Hindus … of their suitable
discoveries in the science of astronomy—discoveries even more ingenious than
those of the Greeks and Babylonians, of their rational system of mathematics,
or of their method of calculation which no words can praise strongly enough; I
mean the system using nine symbols. --- Severus Sebokht
30.
When I read the Bhagavad Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous. ---Albert Einstein
31.
“Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation
and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the
birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of
inorganic matter,” and that “For the modern physicists, then, Shiva’s dance is
the dance of subatomic matter.”
“Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics.”- Fritjof Kapra
32.
Everything has come down to us from the banks of Ganges ---- Francois Voltaire
33.
If there is a country on earth which can justify the claim the honour of having been the cradle of the Human race or at least the scene of primitive civilization, the successive developments of which carried into all parts of the ancient world and even beyond the blessings of knowledge which is the second life of man, that country is assuredly India. -- Friedrich Creuzer - German philologist and archaeologist.
34.
1 comment:
Brilliant article. Hats off to you.
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