History of Vedic Math

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The Magic of Vedic Maths

 

Its History & Origin

 

"In Vedic times, it is believed, math formulae were often taught

within the context of spiritual expression (mantra). Thus while

learning spiritual lessons, one could also learn mathematics

 

"The world owes most to India in the realm of mathematics, which was

developed in the Gupta period to a stage more advanced than that

reached by any other nation of antiquity. The success of Indian

mathematics was mainly due to the fact that Indians had a clear

conception of the abstract number as distinct from the numerical

quantity of objects or spatial extension."

~ A.L. Basham, Australian Indologist in The Wonder That Was India

 

Born in the Vedic Age, but buried under centuries of debris, this

remarkable system of calculation was deciphered towards the beginning

of the 20th century, when there was a great interest in ancient

Sanskrit texts, especially in Europe. However, certain texts called

Ganita Sutras, which contained mathematical deductions, were ignored,

because no one could find any mathematics in them. These texts, it's

believed, bore the germs of what we now know as Vedic Mathematics.

 

Bharati Krishna Tirthaji's Discovery

Vedic math was rediscovered from the ancient Indian scriptures

between 1911 and 1918 by Sri Bharati Krishna Tirthaji (1884-1960), a

scholar of Sanskrit, Mathematics, History and Philosophy. He studied

these ancient texts for years, and after careful investigation was

able to reconstruct a series of mathematical formulae called sutras.

 

Bharati Krishna Tirthaji, who was also the former Shankaracharya

(major religious leader) of Puri, India, delved into the ancient

Vedic texts and established the techniques of this system in his

pioneering work — Vedic Mathematics (1965), which is considered the

starting point for all work on Vedic math. It is said that after

Bharati Krishna's original 16 volumes of work expounding the Vedic

system were lost, in his final years he wrote this single volume,

which was published five years after his death.

 

Development of Vedic Math

Vedic math was immediately hailed as a new alternative system of

mathematics, when a copy of the book reached London in the late

1960s. Some British mathematicians, including Kenneth Williams,

Andrew Nicholas and Jeremy Pickles took interest in this new system.

They extended the introductory material of Bharati Krishna's book,

and delivered lectures on it in London. In 1981, this was collated

into a book entitled Introductory Lectures on Vedic Mathematics. A

few successive trips to India by Andrew Nicholas between 1981 and

1987, renewed the interest on Vedic math, and scholars and teachers

in India started taking it seriously.