Two New Yorkers spend six months 18 months!?! in Bangalore and other places in India.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Indian Math

This week's podcast of the BBC's radio show In Our Time is about Indian Math. Although it's very once-over-lightly, covering thousands of years and a lot of area in just 45 or so minutes, it covers a great deal the early developments in Indian, which included the use of zero, the concept of infinity, and the Pythagorean theorem (before Pythagoras), and the Arabic numerals. One weird fact: those numerals weren't allowed to be used in book-keeping in England until the 18th century. I guess they were still totaling them up with Roman numerals. Must have been annoying.

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