Panini:
In the distant past (circa 600-500 BC), on the banks of the river Indus, lived a great scholar and astrologer named Pani. Thanks to the boon of Lord Shiva, Pani’s wife gave birth to a healthy boy. The boy was named Panini, the son of Pani.
The young boy was highly energetic and was the apple of his parents’ eyes. He became a sweet child whose smile made one think of the moon during a full moon night.
One day, a great scholar, astrologer and palmist came to Pani. He was a close friend of Pani. Pani and his family welcomed the great man with courtesy. He was given the best food and the best services. After lunch, the great man summoned the child Panini and requested him to sit with him. Panini agreed and sat with the great man.
The great man examined the right palm of the child. He sat there looking at the palm for a number of minutes. The look on his face transformed from one of cheerfulness to one of worry. Observing this transformation, Pani asked the great man what was worrying him.
The great man pitied Pani with sad eyes and uttered the words “Oh Pani! My friend! You are such a great scholar and people all over the globe approach you seeking advice. Alas! It is the fate of this child of yours that he will turn out to be illiterate. He has no Education Line in his palm.”
Pani questioned his friend- “Please excuse me. I am not uttering this because I am doubting your experience, but could it be that you haven’t examined my son’s palm properly?”
The great man gazed at Pani, whose eyes attempted to suppress their sorrow, and uttered “My friend! I have examined the boy’s palm carefully, twice and there is no Education Line here. He is sure to stay illiterate.”
Pani could no longer suppress his sorrow. He shut his eyes and grumbled under his breath “If the lord wishes it to be so, so be it!”
Panini, who was present, asked the great man politely, “Sir, would you kindly show me where on my palm the education line would be, if I had one?”
The great man indicated the place of the education line on his own palm. He sympathized with the child, who was so nicely behaved and soft spoken.
The child went out of the house and came back after a few minutes. He extended his right hand and questioned the great man “Will I become a scholar now? Will I be able to maintain my father’s fame?”
The great man and Pani looked at the child’s hand and were shocked. Blood was oozing out of the palm and where there had to be the education line, there was a deep line which was carved with a sharp stone. The two men were speechless.
Panini was brought in his childhood days by his father for studies and Pani was amazed at the insatiable thirst for study in his son. To gain more knowledge, Panini meditated about Lord Shiva and did penance for numerous years. Placed with awe by the devotion of Panini, Lord Shiva appeared before him. But Panini was so immersed in his meditation that he did not even realize the Lord’s presence. To wake up Panini, Shiva rang his Damaru. The beat of the Damaru rung out and Panini awoke from his trance. The noise generated by Shiva’s Damaru continued echoing in Panini’s mind. Panini welcomed the lord and the lord gave his blessings to him and vanished.
Panini is said to have codified the rules of Sanskrit morphology, syntax and semantics in fourteen verses, believed to be Shiva’s Damaru’s sounds, and named them as Maheshwara Sutrani.
These Sutras are also referred to as Aṣṭādhyāyī, or eight chapters, the basic text of the grammatical school of the Vedanga.
Charak
Acharya Charak took birth in 300 BC and was a major contributor to Ayurveda’s ancient art and science, medicine, and philosophy of life as developed in Ancient India. Charaka lived between AD 150-200 and 100 BC. Charaka is famous as the editor of the medical treatise Charaka Samhita, one of the fundamental books of traditional Indian medicine and Ayurveda, which is included in the Brihat-Trayi.
As per Charaka’s thoughts, health and disease are not preordained and human effort and lifestyle awareness can help in extending lifespan. As per Indian culture and Ayurvedic philosophy, prevention of all diseases is greater than cure, including restructuring of lifestyle in accordance with nature’s rhythm and the six seasons, which will keep an individual in overall health.
Whereas Charaka learned everything about medicine, including the philosophy and reasoning behind the Indian medical system, he put particular emphasis on diagnosing illness and considered Ayurveda as an integrated system of medical care that catered to both preventive as well as curative aspects. He also discussed matters like fetal creation and growth, physiology of the human organism and body function and malfunction. As per Charaka, a body functions because it possesses three doshas or principles: movement (Vata), transformation (Pitta), and lubrication and stability (Kapha). These doshas are the same as the Western classification of humour, wind, bile, and phlegm. They are formed when dhatus (blood, flesh, and marrow) act upon the food ingested. But the same quantity of food eaten, one body formulates dosha in another quantity than the other. This is why one body is different from another.
Additionally, he pointed out that disease is due to an imbalance in the equilibrium of the three doshas in the human body. He prescribed medicines to restore equilibrium. Even though he knew of microbes in the body, he did not value them much.
Srinivasa Ramanujan, (Dec. 22, 1887, Erode, India—April 26, 1920, Kumbakonam), Indian mathematician whose work on the theory of numbers comprises innovative discoveries of the partition function’s properties.
At age 15, he got hold of George Shoobridge Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 2 vol. (1880–86). This compilation of thousands of theorems, most with just the barest hint of a proof and nothing later than 1860, stirred his genius. After having checked the outcomes in Carr’s book, Ramanujan surpassed it, building upon it with his own theorems and concepts. In 1903 he obtained a scholarship to the University of Madras but lost it a year later since he abandoned all other studies for the study of mathematics.
Ramanujan persisted in his work, unemployed and in the most impoverished conditions. After he married in 1909 he commenced a quest for permanent employment that culminated in an interview with a government servant, Ramachandra Rao. Conscious of Ramanujan’s mathematical abilities, Rao subsidized his research for a period, but Ramanujan was unwilling to live on charity and secured a clerical appointment with the Madras Port Trust.
Srinivasa Ramanujan discovered a lost brother in the form of G.H Hardy and then initiated an exquisite discovery and rediscovery. Together they made great discoveries. The news spread soon and Srinivasa departed for England only to return with an ailing disease. His return in 1920 was the starting point of his bad health, which seemed to lead to death.
Srinivasa discovered approximately 3900 theorems and reworked hundreds of other existing theorems. His untold biography is not only inspiring but very saddening too. If he were alive today the world would have known about what infinity really is and how it is meant to represent. Nowadays we live in a time where Srinivasa isn’t very popular but the feature film that made its debut at International Film Festival Goa has certainly brought him up as a maths genius. The world now knows that there existed a man who understood what Infinity really is.
A mathematical whiz kid and a child prodigy, Vashishtha Narayan Singh died at the ripe age of 74. Singh’s life was no less than a Bollywood film with all its ups and downs, turns and twists that came with it. But it had little to do with the field of mathematics he loved and everything to do with his intimate dalliance with madness.
He was the first-born of five siblings, to police constable Lal Bahadur Singh and Lahaso Devi, in Bihar. He was the only one who finished school from Netarhat Residential School and proceeded to graduate from the Patna Science College. But he did not rest on his laurels and he finished his bachelor’s and his master’s in mathematics in two years rather than the typical five years. He traveled to the United States where he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Reproducing Kernels and Operators with a Cyclic Vector or the Cycle Vector Space Theory.
Following the accumulation of several degrees, Singh began working as an assistant professor at the University of Washington. He also served at NASA, during the Apollo missions in 1969 and it is reported that he assisted with the mathematical calculations during the mission. In an article from The Indian Express, Singh’s brother discusses this incident and he mentions “He is the ‘NASA scientist’ who repaired a bug in the space agency’s computers that had crashed ‘moments before the Apollo human spaceflight mission launch”. The computers had also crashed for 30-35 seconds and Singh started doing it manually during the period they repaired it. The same results were generated by Singh and the computers. But no official sources support this tale.
There is also another tale according to which Singh had negated Einstein’s theory of relativity but once again there are no sources which support or contradict this.
He returned to India in 1971 where he held positions at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, Indian Statical Institute (ISI), Kolkata and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai but could never stay with these for any long duration. It is during this time that his mind started to fail and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mental illness that begins at a young age and is usually never cured. It may also co-occur with other mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, or substance-use disorders. He would suffer from this mental illness for the next 40 years and his path to mathematical glory was short-circuited. He would live a life of obscurity until he passed away this year. Singh is compared to another Indian, mathematical mastermind, the Tamil mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Similar to Ramanujan, Singh too lacked formal education in maths and his ability was found in a small Bihar town. Singh and Ramanujan, both went to far-off places (the USA and Britain respectively) and established a name for themselves. But unlike Ramanuja, Singh never gained the same level of stardom and fame. He descended into the history books, not for his mathematical abilities but for the genius that lost its mind.
John Dalton (1766 – 1844) is the person to whom today’s credit goes for creating atomic theory. But it would come as a surprise to many people today that the theory of atoms had been created 2,600 years earlier by an Indian sage and philosopher. The initial Indian philosopher who created concepts regarding the atom in a systematic way was Sage Kanad who resided in the 6th century B.C.
Kanad was born in 600 B.C. at Dwarka, Gujrat. His actual name was Kashyap. His father was a philosopher named Ulka. Even in his childhood days Kashyapa showed great enthusiasm for service. Small things drew his interest.
After he went on a pilgrimage, he saw thousands of pilgrims sprinkling the town roads & banks of river Ganga with rice grains and flowers which they offered at the temple.
He began gathering the rice grains. Everyone believed that he was mad because he belonged to a respectable family. Crowd had surrounded him & one asked him why he was harvesting the grains even beggars would not like to touch them. He informed them that single grains alone in themselves are not anything worthwhile, yet the number of some hundred grains comprise an individual’s meal, and the amount of many meals could sustain an entire family and then finally the entire mankind comprised numerous families, hence even one single grain of rice was worth equal to all precious wealth of this world. After that people began addressing him as Kanad, as “Kan” in Sanskrit translates as “Smallest particle”. Kanad was the very first human to talk about atoms and molecules.
It was Kanad who established for the very first time that the Parmanu (Atoms) was an unbreakable particle of matter. The material universe consists of Parmanus (Atoms) as per the material. When matter is subdivided and divided, we arrive at a point after which no further division is possible, the indivisible unit of matter is Parmanu (Atom). Kanad described that this indivisible, indestructible atom cannot be perceived by any human organ. This theory struck him when Kanad was walking with food in his hand, dividing it into minute pieces when he realized that he could not further divide the food into parts, it was too minute. From this point onwards, Kanad developed the concept of a particle which could not be divided any more. He referred to that indivisible matter as Parmanu (atom).
Kanad also believed that atoms of the same material came together to form divyanka (diatomic molecule) and tryanuka (triatomic molecule). Kanad also believed that atoms were mixed in different ways to form chemical alterations under the influence of other parameters like heat.
The world was introduced to Aryabhatta through his extraordinary contribution to mathematics and astronomy.
Aryabhata is one of the most celebrated Indian Mathematicians, in fact, one among the first. Aryabhata was born in the Gupta period which is during the reign of Gupta Dynasty in the year 475 CE at Kusumapura, Pataliputra. He was famous for his profound expertise in the astronomical division. Aryabhata has written numerous treaties on mathematics as well as astronomy. Much of his writings are lost but others remain in their original forms available to today’s scholars and of high integrity. And his innovations, discovery and contributions brought dignity to our nation. And his path also gave inspiration to a lot of potential scientists and it made people invent. In Aryabhatiya Indian Mathematical Literature was well written.
The Vedic mathematical technique to resolve maths problems has been researched and as expected the same has made its way even during modern days. The finer points of algebra, arithmetic, plane trigonometry, spherical trigonometry were discussed. Aryabhata is bestowed with the honor of being called the ‘Father Of Algebra’. Aryabhatta aptly insisted that the earth revolves daily around the sun on its axis and the motion of stars seemed to be due to the relative motion caused by the rotation of the earth. This was contrary to the then extremely popular notion that it is the sky that turns. With measured evidence, it was demonstrated that heliocentrism is the planets’ rotation around the sun, axially. Aryabhata described lunar and solar eclipses through scientific experiments. He asserted that the planets and the Moonshine due to the reflected sunlight. He described the eclipses as shadows cast on the Earth. In appreciation of Aryabhata’s works, the Government of Bihar has set up Aryabhatta Knowledge University to encourage astronomical knowledge among students who are interested. Besides, the first Indian satellite was also given his name.
–Dr. Preenon Bagchi
Dean, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Madhav University