3 ms·
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
by michael_dorfman 15y ago
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 15y agoYes. 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/0691120676 http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-India-Kim-Plofker/dp/06911... 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&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 http://books.google.com/books?id=DHvThPNp9yMC&pg=PA16...