You may find the work of Kerala mathematicians on Taylor series of sin, cos, and arctan quite intriguing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_school_of_astronom

You may find the work of Kerala mathematicians on Taylor series of sin, cos, and arctan quite intriguing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_school_of_astronomy_and_mathematics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_school_of_astronomy_and_... They happen to be at the center of a minor controversy and semantic games of what exactly is Calculus because they were doing these series approximations routinely about a couple of centuries before the European recognition of the Taylor series or calculus for that matter.