Raju, C.K.

Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: The Nature of Mathematical Proof and

Transmission of the Calculus From India to Europe in the 16th c.

2007

Centre for Studies in Civilisations, New Delhi

This book brings new facts on the history of mathematics and science that if carried to its

logical conclusions should transform our Eurocentric perceptions. The author

C.K. Raju

comes

to this

task with an impeccable hands-down knowledge of science and technology.

He was a leading figure in the first supercomputer put together in India at a time when

the US banned supercomputer exports to India, the ideology of computing in

mathematics being identical to the Indian ideology of mathematics which he posits.

Science,

Raju notes is (still) widely

considered an internal domestic Western affair. Most

conference organisers, teachers and researchers assume that the history and philosophy of

science begins and ends within a Western trajectory.

What he attempts is to bring new

material from other cultures to fill in the gaps as well as highlight some of the contextual

factors within Europe to highlight the particular wrong views he critiques.

He notes that the suppression of ideas has a long history in Europe. With the emergence

of Christianity a lethal death penalty was declared on heretics and all schools of

philosophy were closed down in the Roman Empire eventually leading to the [Christian]

Dark Ages. Christian mobs led by violent priests

burnt down the great library at

Alexandria and attacked their ideological opponents like the neo Platonists. The

suppressed European classical tradition was partly kept among the Arabs, the latter

adding knowledge from the East including from India.. However when Europe began

moving out of the Dark Age partly utilising Arab knowledge,

the entire knowledge found

in Arabic books up to the 11th century including those with Indic inputs was subject to a

strategy of Hellenization attributing them solely to Greek sources. There was now a

revisionist histor y being marketed with the early Greeks been the fountain head of all

knowledge at Toledo (the Arabic intellectual centre in Spain) and elsewhere where the

Arab contribution was considered only as transmitters of Greek knowledge. But if one

examine is the facts objectively one arrives at a different picture.

Not even a single historical source of Greeks books is available from Alexandria, Raju

points out. Raju claims that monumental theories of Greek source of science has been

built from stray casual remarks in texts from the 12th century. I am not a Greek historian

but the implications of this are truly revolutionary.

Raju throws a harsh historical light on some of the legendary figures in the Greek

tradition and comes out with a huge question mark. For example, the key historical

source of information of the presumed Euclid of the

Elements

is a single remark in a

manuscript by no means written before the 10th century AD. The archaeological

evidence indicates that there was no definitive text of the

Elements

before the fourth

century. If this were the actual historical evidence about one of the better known figures

such as Euclid the situation with others such as Archimedes, Aristotle, Ptolemy was also

problematic although the existence of Aristotle is not in doubt.

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