Growing up in Indian schools, we were taught to look at history as a matter of fact. But as we realise, history has many accounts depending on what version you want to believe. This is about a new book about the less known history of mathematics and mathematicians, The Secret Lives of Numbers by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell. The authors argue that the famous mathematicians in history have all been male and white and the book “…shines a light on overlooked contributions to maths by women and men in China, India, the Arabian peninsula and other parts of the world.”
Among various stories in the book, the article highlights this interesting one about the origins of calculus:
“…the invention of calculus – the theory for describing and determining how things change over time – is typically credited to Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, who each developed their own version in the 17th century. But Kitagawa and Revell contend that neither of them got their first, tracing the roots of calculus instead to 14th-century India and a a school in Kerala, where the mathematician Madhava of Sangamagrama used elements of calculus in his teaching.
Revell, who is executive editor of New Scientist, says: “The origins of calculus are normally told as this battle between two titans of mathematics – Newton and Leibniz – and of course both of those people did an awful lot of work on calculus.
“There’s a fun part of that story where Newton says, well, the person who will settle who got there first will be the Royal Society. The Royal Society decides it’s Newton. But of course Newton was head of the Royal Society – not the world’s most independent report on that front.”
He continues: “But hundreds of years before, in the 14th century, there was a mathematician called Madhava, and he was part of a school in Kerala, India, where they had loads of fantastic mathematicians. They worked on something that if you looked at it today, you would say, that’s calculus.
“Now, it doesn’t have all the polish of the modern calculus but it has the crucial parts of it. It has infinite series, which are absolutely crucial to calculus, and it also has some of the rules that they must have known, which you can infer from some of their writings also suggests they had a better understanding of the theory. For us that is part of the origin story of calculus.””
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