Many traditionalists whether in India or in Iran regard secularism in education as the biggest enemy of traditional values. (A recent example of this thinking is Bharat Gupt’s article posted at http://indiafacts.co.in/religious-pluralism-and-distorted-notions-of-secularism-in-education/ ) These traditionalists are dead wrong: the church has succeeded so well because those it considers its biggest…
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As part of a series of workshops on science and various religions, there was a day-long workshop on science and Islam at the Universiti Sains Islamic Malaysia. My presentations are posted online: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. This developed the paper on Islam and science presented as a keynote…
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Became an honorary member of the the Institute of Complex Thought at the University Ricardo Palma. Good to know that they want to try the 5-day course on calculus.
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A few years ago, when a friend, Jorge Ishizawa from Lima, asked for a copy of my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, I wondered what he would do with it. (I sent it, but it bounced back.) On a recent visit to Peru, I had a conversation with people at…
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The abstract of my talk at MIT differs from my presentation, posted at http://ckraju.net/papers/presentations/MIT.pdf. The point I made in the talk was that MIT teaches calculus and trigonometry wrongly. This is just because Europeans failed to understand the mathematics they imported from India. For example, the very words “trigonometry”, “zero”, “surd”,…
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For almost two decades now, I have been pointing out that formal mathematics (and much Western philosophy) is based on the false belief that proof based on two valued logic (“deduction”) is “superior” to empirical proof (“induction”). This belief is NOT universal (e.g. Indian mathematicians used empirical proofs, e.g. Buddhists…
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Recently I participated in a panel on science and religion in the Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology. The students who were brought up indoctrinated with Western stories of the conflict between science and religion were dumbfounded when I asked the following question. If science and religion were at war, why…
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Some months ago, I was invited to Patna for a meeting organized by Sanjay Paswan, dalit leader and former Union Minister of State for HRD. Unfortunately, I had to cancel the visit at the last minute, but wrote a short account of my speech. The speech was a response to…
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My article published today in The Hindu, was heavily abbreviated. The more detailed original article in about 1200 words is easier to understand. The petition to teach religiously neutral math, and related material is already on this blog. A draft of a more detailed paper on “Eternity and Infinity” delineating…
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My article on the claim that Vasco “discovered” India. On the religious and legal “Doctrine of Christian Discovery” any land belongs to the first Christian to sight it whose Christian duty it is to murder or enslave the original inhabitants. That is what happened in the Americas and Australia, but…