Science In Ancient India:Prelude To The Greeks

Indians were the foremost mathematicians of ancient times and had already solved many a problems that later Greeks recorded and have become known for; for example Baudh-yana and his students Val-yana, Pastamba and K-Ty-yana in 300 BCE described the relationship between the hypotenuse and sides of right angled triangles,(known in the west as Pythagoras' theorem) over 2500 hundred years before the solution ascribed to Pythagoras. Much of the Euclidean geometry, the Archimedes principle and other Greek work had their source in Vedic writing and teachings.

Incidentally, the name Pythagoras derives from two Sanskrit words, Pithi and Guru, meaning "Schoolmaster." He was perhaps a resident Indian mathematician recruited to teach Athenians, in much the same way many of us are recruited by the western Universities.

The knowledge amassed by Indian scholars had, by 700 BC, concentrated in two major universities, at Nalanda in Bihar and at Takshasila (Taxila) in Punjab, which accepted and enrolled students from all over the world - much as great universities do today- including many from Persia, the Roman Empire, Greece, China and Egypt. Ujjain, a city in north central India known for its scholars, had become a geographic and astronomical reference point, the zero longitude, as Greenwich is today. Indian scholars travelled far and wide teaching and demonstrating as we still do.

One such journey that became well-known occurred in 499 AD, when the Indian Gupta emperor sent astronomer Aryabhatta - a mathematical genius, then 23, whose major work 'Aryabhatiya' survives - on a goodwill tour of the Middle East and the Mediterranean for seminars and lectures on Indian computational methods, partly to improve the accuracy and standardization of accounting practices and to show how Mathematics (Ganit) has improved understanding of our world and of the Universe.