A few days back, I was at a convention of schoolteachers of mathematics. One of the keynote addresses was delivered by a college professor on Vedic Mathematics and why it must be brought to use in a school curriculum. I was a little disturbed by the misinformation. Even more worrying was the fact that it looked like the audience had unquestioningly lapped it up. There is a huge misconception about the term ‘Vedic Mathematics’. There is another body of work that is appropriately christened ‘Vedic Mathematics’ and this refers to the vast and extraordinary mathematics that was discovered in ancient times of the Vedas.
Let me explain how the term ‘Vedic Mathematics’ as a misnomer came about. In the 1960’s, the late and respected Swami Krishna Tirtha, had authored a manuscript by this name and the work was posthumously published in 1965. Swami Krishna Tirtha states in the preface that his work was inspired by the Vedas. The book is an interesting one in case you wish to indulge in parlour tricks with numbers and even with some algebra. For instance, it gives a very quick method for multiplying any two three-digit numbers. However, the moment the number of digits changes you need a new method.
The other problem with such material is that it does not contain any mathematical ideas such as the idea of the statement and proof of the theorem of Pythagoras or Ramanujan’s discovery of the statement and attempted proof of the Prime Number Theorem. India will suffer a great disservice if this kind of Vedic Mathematics is brought into the mainstream.
I now come to what is very correctly called Vedic Mathematics and which refers to the profound discoveries made during the Vedic period and even beyond. The so-called theorem of Pythagoras was well-known in India a few hundred years before the time of Pythagoras. The Satapatha Brahmana states the theorem and this text is hundreds of years before the time of Pythagoras. More interestingly, during the time that the Vedas were being composed and practiced a significant amount of mathematics was discovered and embodied in several texts that are now collectively known as the Sulba Sutras. Each Sulba Sutra has essentially been authored by a mathematician.
For instance, the Sulba Sutra of Baudhyana was authored about 300 years before the time of Pythagoras. This text not only states the theorem of Pythagoras but also gives ideas that lead to an algorithmic proof. Incidentally, there is ample evidence to indicate that Pythagoras visited India. Voltaire writes that he came to India to learn from the Brahmins on the banks of the Ganga. He was also profoundly impacted by Jain philosophy, and it seems that he became a vegetarian. Then there is that great prosodist Pingala, from about 200 years before the start of the Christian era who discovered through Sanskrit poetry a very useful mathematical device that was rediscovered in Europe 1800 years later by Pascal. I must also mention the Bakshali manuscript that is the first recorded evidence of the decimal system.
A carbon dating test at Oxford seems to indicate that this is in most parts from around 200-300 CE. I am not even mentioning the important mathematical discoveries that were made in ancient India by mathematicians such as Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskaracharya, Madhava and Neelkantha to name a few. Perhaps a little bit of exposure to their ideas may be of better use and help to our young minds than spending too much time with the other faux Vedic Mathematics.
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Dinesh Singh
Former Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University; Adjunct Professor of Mathematics, University of Houston, US