FOREWORD
Through trackless centuries of Indian history, Mathematics has always occupied the pride of place in India's scientific heritage. The poet aptly proclaims the primacy of the Science of Mathematics in a vivid metaphor
Mathematics is universally regarded as the science of all sciences and "the priestess of definiteness and clarity". J .F. Herbert acknowledges that "everything that the greatest minds of all times have accomplished towards the comprehension of forms by means of concepts is gathered into one great science, Mathematics". In India's intellectual history and no less in the intellectual history of other civilisations, Mathematics stands forth as that which unites and mediates between Man and Nature, inner and outer world, thought and perception.
Indian Mathematics belongs not only to an hoary antiquity but is a living discipline with a potential for manifold modem applications. It takes its inspiration from the pioneering, though unfinished work of the late Bharati Krishna Tirthaji, a former Sankaracharya of Puri of revered memory who reconstructed a unique system on the basis of ancient Indian tradition of mathematics. British teachers have prepared textbooks of Vedic Mathematics for British Schools. Vedic mathematics is thus a bridge across centuries, civilisations, linguistic barriers and national frontiers.
Vedic mathematics is not only a sophisticated pedagogic and research tool but also an introduction to an ancient civilisation. It takes us back to many millennia of India's mathematical heritage. Rooted in the ancient Vedic sources which heralded the dawn of human history and illumined by their erudite exegesis, India's intellectual, scientific and aesthetic vitality blossomed and triumphed not only in philosophy, physics, astronomy, ecology and performing arts but also in geometry, algebra and arithmetic. Indian mathemati- cians gave the world the numerals now in universal use. The crowning glory of Indian mathematics was the invention of zero and the introduction of decimal notation without which mathematics as a scientific discipline could not have made much headway. It is noteworthy that the ancient Greeks and Romans did not have the decimal notation and, therefore, did not make much progress in the numerical sciences. The Arabs first learnt the decimal notation from Indians and introduced it into Europe. The renowned Arabic scholar, Alberuni or Abu Raihan, who was born in 973 A.D. and travelled to India, testified that the Indian attainments in mathematics were unrivalled and unsurpassed. In keeping with that ingrained tradition of mathematics in India, S. Ramanujan, "the man who knew infinity", the genius who was one of the greatest mathematicians of our time and the mystic for whom "a mathematical equation had a meaning because it expressed a thought of God", blazed new mathematical trails in Cambridge University in the second decade of the twentieth century even though he did not himself possess a university degree.
* Lagadha, Verse 35
I do not wish to claim for Vedic Mathematics as we know it today the status of a discipline which has perfect answers to every problem. I do however question those who mindlessly deride the very idea and nomenclature of Vedic mathematics and regard it as an anathema. They are obviously affiliated to ideological prejudice and their ignorance is matched only by their arrogance. Their mindset were bequeathed to them by Macaulay who knew next to nothing of India's scientific and cultural heritage. They suffer from an incurable lack of self-esteem coupled with an irrational and obscurantist unwillingness to celebrate the glory of Indian achievements in the disciplines of mathematics, astronomy, architecture, town planning, physics, philosophy, metaphysics, metallurgy, botany and medicine. They are as conceited and dogmatic in rejecting Vedic Mathematics as those who naively attribute every single invention and discovery in human history to our ancestors of antiquity. Let us reinstate reasons as well as intuition and let us give a fair chance to the valuable insights of the past. Let us use that precious knowledge as a building block. To the detractors of Vedic Mathematics I would like to make a plea for sanity, objectivity and balance. They do not have to abuse or disown the past in order to praise the present.
Dr. L.M. Singhvi, M.P.
Formerly High Commissioner for India in the UK