

The Scientific Revolution Of India Before Muslim and British Conquest - da02
http://mindbodypolitic.com/2011/12/10/the-scientific-revolution-of-indian-before-muslim-and-british-conquest/

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michael_dorfman
It's worth noting that a lot of the dates mentioned in this article are far
from the scholarly consensus on the matter; to take one example, the
attribution of the Puranas to Vyasa is roughly similar to the attribution of
the Pentateuch to Moses; it's not a reliable foundation for dating the texts
(which most scholars place far later than 1000BCE.)

Similarly, the claim that Pythagoras was acquainted with the Upanishads is not
historically attested; there's some fascinating work (by McEvilley) on
cultural diffusion between the Ancient Greek and Ancient Indian worlds, but
much of it is conjectural, and there's no "smoking gun" to support blanket
statements of the type "Pythagoras read the Upanishads."

Finally, in my reading of the secondary literature, most scholars reverse the
chronology in the statement "Philosophical formulations concerning Shunya -
i.e. emptiness or the void may have facilitated in the introduction of the
concept of zero." The consensus seems to be the opposite-- that the concept of
zero in mathematics appears to have influenced the philosophical formulations
around emptiness.

~~~
tokenadult
Yes. The dates of ancient texts from India are often based on legend rather
than history. (A similar phenomenon in China turns an actual 3,000 years of
Chinese history, with reliably dated written records, into a proverbial "5,000
years of Chinese history," which counts eras of unhistorical legends recorded
in later historical sources as though they were really historical.) An
accessible, accurate, and honest book about mathematics in India is
Mathematics in India by Kim Plofker.

[http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-India-Kim-
Plofker/dp/06911...](http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-India-Kim-
Plofker/dp/0691120676)

The highly divergent Amazon reader reviews (I really ought to add my own five-
star review, as I have read the whole book), and especially how divergent some
of the Amazonian reviews are from the professional reviews of the book, show
how controversial some of these issues are. The issue of the history of
science and technology in India is tightly interwound with domestic politics
in India. The whole notion of "Vedic mathematics" is based on willful
misunderstandings of the sources. Plofker in footnote 7 from page 16 of
Mathematics in India cites works by scholars in India who have dug into the
primary sources, and disagree with the usual claims about "Vedic mathematics."

[http://books.google.com/books?id=DHvThPNp9yMC&pg=PA16...](http://books.google.com/books?id=DHvThPNp9yMC&pg=PA16&dq=popular+usage+of+the+term+%22Vedic+mathematics%22+often+differs&hl=en&ei=RpGwS86wHp7MMt_GnbUO&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=popular%20usage%20of%20the%20term%20%22Vedic%20mathematics%22%20often%20differs&f=false)

