The debate seems to have generated wide interest, so I thought I would record it here. Here is my original post on H-Asia. The comment from Michael Witzel, of Harvard University, is given in the comments section under that. Probability in Ancient India ************************************ The history of Asia is somehow understood in…
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Like calculus, probability too started off in India. People have long been asking me to write about it, and I finally did so. My article on “Probability in Ancient India” is finally out in the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, vol. 7. Philosophy of Statistics by Elsevier. The first…
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This question is often asked. Here is the short answer (in the terse Indian sutra style) It makes math easy, by eliminating the religious bias in it, and gives a better math, physics and history.
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On the occasion of Gagarin’s 50th anniversary and Ambedkar Jayanti take a look at my article http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.2945v2. This corrects (the conceptual defect in) Newton’s “law” of gravitation, and explains the anomalous orbits of NASA spacecraft, and also stars in the galaxy, which that “law” cannot explain (and which have not…
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Though Stephen Hawking seems to have moved on from singularity theory in his latest book (http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/review_the-christian-propaganda-in-stephen-hawkings-work_1495047), there is one point about singularities which still needs to be clarified, since even the Large Hadronic Collider website confounds a singularity with a moment of creation. The question is what sort of singularity?…
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In an earlier blog I had pointed out how Robert Thomas the editor of an Oxford university journal, had adopted the extraordinary procedure of soliciting my book (Cultural Foundations of Mathematics) for review (on Christmas eve)! The reviewer, Jose Ferreiros clownishly proceded to review only 2 chapters of the book. Ferreiros lied that I…
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Dear Neeraj or Amartya (or whoever you are), You say >One of the chief reasons why most > of us are drawn to the notion of rigor today however, is not religious > but simply because of the elegant, sublime, almost surreal nature of > rigorous mathematical proofs. First,…
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Dear Mr Jain, For a masters level math student you seem quite enterprising. You ask: > Going through the material on your website, I was not able to decide > whether you envision a paradigm shift only in terms of the teaching of > calculus or a…
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Have been meaning to update this blog for a long time, but was too busy to do so. Sometime in early April I went to Ahmedabad to give a talk at the new IIT coming up there. One of those rare occasions when I missed my flight (even in Delhi,…
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Recently, someone who had invited me for a talk, wanted a bio, and sent in a short bio, evidently taken from the Wikipedia, which says “Much of Raju’s beliefs have been highly controversial, especially his claims that the philosophies that underlie subjects like time and mathematics are rooted in the…