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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (886)	5/26/1998 12:06:00 AM
From: Rational	Respond to of 12475

Mohan and all: Let me point out the genius Ramanujam who basically wrote math equations (which are theorems) after deducing them on a slate. All his works preserved in Cambridge have his hand-written "results" which most mathematicians believed to be either false (because they were quite weird looking integrals, etc.) or incomprehensible. Now, math departments are producing doctoral theses by simply proving the results that Ramanujam slated to be truth. I have seen volumes produced by Springer & Verlag on Ramanujam's work (which have a lot of applications in supercomputing), containing the results he once transcribed from his slates into hand written notes and the proofs leading to those results obtained by fresh math Ph.D.'s. The famous mathematicians who are compiling Ramanujam's work have not completed the task in 3 volumes. They have commented how many such Ramanujams may be wandering in Indian villages! What does an ordinary Western visitor to Ramanujam's home see? A home with no indoor plumbing in which an unkempt, ugly-looking, blackish guy is writing gibberish endlessly on a slate. The visitor wonders, "is this Indian intelligence?" He comes to the rich Western world to proclaim with his infinite experience in Indian villages that these Indian villagers are really dumb and that it is laughable that such an India will be a power. One can only laugh at these visitors because they simply do not have the intelligence to fathom the wisdom of Indian villagers. Rational

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (886)	5/26/1998 11:28:00 AM
From: Papillon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Greetings Mohan, You truly are the Earl of URL, as others have noted. No, I have not read or studied Aryabhatta, but I have certainly read about him. Math and science are not my forte. There can be no question but that he was a brilliant mathematician and astronomer, but note the concern in some of your links to claim firsts that weren't first. E.g., the claim that he was the first to realize the true shape of the earth. Just because many Europeans a few centuries ago were too dull to realize it, doesn't mean it wasn't known earlier. It is well known that the Greeks, at least seven centuries before Aryabhatta, were aware of the spherical nature of the earth. One Greek mathematician, whose name eludes me (it has been a long time since my pre-Socratics class) used the curvature of the earth to calculate the size of the earth and he was accurate to within two hundred miles. This was long, long before Aryabhatta, which is not to diminish Aryabhatta's accomplishments in any way. I wonder how many Indians realize that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin are cognates because they derive from a single, common source? The "Aryans" who went one direction became Indians and the "Aryans" who went another direction became Europeans. In both places they blended with the people of those areas. Ram-Ram, Papillon