Saturday, November 26, 2005
In Quest of Zero !
Yesterday on the train to Amsterdam (before it was cancelled..uggghhh...cant get over it yet) me and A happenned to meet a Portuguese gentleman on the train. He is a professor in Hamburg university and naturally knew a lot more about Goa, India and indian IT success story than a average German. While chatting he "demonstrated" his knowledge about Indian culture by telling me that Sanskrit was the first known langugae in world with advanced structured grammer and he also had read about ancient Indian literary great- Panini. To add to his knowledge and maybe little gloated with his flattery I boasted that Panini gave the world the numeral Zero. I was not sure if Panini or Arybhatta invented it, but knew that he would lap it up as a fact:-) I know Panini had something to do with sanskrit grammer and not math, but its such a old story..who cares...I was not even born then! But today I wanted to really check with Dr Google about invetor of zero and I was amazed to read that it is a debated issue amongst scholars and its NOT conclusive that India gave this world nothing - the zero! Zero was invented independetly thrice, the third time in India, which is debated. After reading many websites, I reached this website and found it really interesting. Read - http://www.mediatinker.com/blog/archives/008821.html I am still trying to search more on Google and will try to post when I find out the real history of Zero. Let me know if you do!
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5 comments:
nice and informative link... recently I was going through a book on indian astronomy and found that the maximum time unit in Indian Jyotish is Kalp (432*10^7 years)and minimum time unit is truti (1/33750 sec).... I believe that such microscale and macroscale units were not possible without zero... and this knowledge, which was written in 5th century AD or so was possible only if there was a great amount of research by previous generations... so although tracing of origin might be very difficult but certainly roots are very old then current researcher shows...
Ashish-> Yes true I also remember reading in "Panchang" about duration of 4 Yugas each of which runs into macroscale units. But problem is that our ancestors never bothered to write down and pass on the knowledge in written form. The Gurukul system was probably root cause where teachers orally taught students. Another reason is that family skills were confined to ones own family tree and not for outsiders due to which many ancient skills have become extinct! maybe I should blog abt this too!
How did Ashish land on this page ??
I know ashish ..:))
oh sada, this ashish is not the "other" ashish..he is "A's" brother :-)
~Amit
Yes I found out ..I msg'ed Ashish and had a brief chat with him :)
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