Institute lecture and workshop at IIT (BHU)
Will be giving the institute lecture at IIT (BHU), the century old first engineering college in India, on the 18th of Jan, followed by a workshop on “Alternative math” on 19th of Jan.
(The Workshop is from 10 am to 5 pm with tea breaks and a lunch break.)
Core question: Indians are proud of our ganita tradition, but today we teach Western formal math believing it to be superior; but what if Indian ganita were superior?
Outline answer: (1) The West was backward in math. It imported most basic math from India, including arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry (via Arabs) and calculus and probability (directly from Cochin). (2) This import created a crisis because practical ganita differed philosophically from religious Western math. To fit it into their framework, the West changed ganita to mathematics by adding religiously-loaded metaphysics. (3) During colonialism, our own ganita wrapped in religiously biased metaphysics and packaged with a false history was returned to us and declared superior. We never cross-checked either that fraud history against evidence or that superstitious Western claim of superiority against commonsense by critically comparing formal math with ganita (normal math) to decide which is really superior. (4) Eliminating the religious/metaphysical elements (a metaphysics of eternity/infinity) in formal math does NOT affect practical value which all comes from normal math. (5) Instead it makes math easy hence enables students to solve harder problems. It also results in better science.
Further details about the lecture and workshop are posted at http://ckraju.net/IIT-BHU/. Explicit links below.
Alternative math 1: Rajju Ganit
Alternative math 2: Calculus without limits.
Detailed schedule