A thousand years before the British came, Indians were doing mathematics. Before the seventh century, while the West was still mired in awkward Roman numerals, India had introduced the numerals we use today. The zero, a symbol expressing nothingness, represented a particular triumph; it may go back to as early as the second century B.C. but definitely appeared in a book in the third century and on the wall of a temple near Gwalior, in central India, in the ninth (where it helped specify a flower garden as 270 units long).
Many of India’s contributions to mathematics were spurred by the need to know, based on astronomical factors, the correct times for Vedic ceremonies. Algebra, geometry, and trigonometry were all thereby enriched. Figures like Aryabhata, born in A.D. 476, who established one of the earliest and best values for π, and Brahmagupta, 150 years later, left theorems even now associated with their names.
It was a rich tradition, but one quite different from that of Greece, the cradle of Western mathematics. Whereas the Greeks, especially Euclid, emphasized formal proof, as in the step-by-step process high school students first encounter in geometry, Indian mathematics stressed the results themselves, however obtained. And without that winnowing out of mathematical dross that formal proof achieved, Indian mathematics was wildly uneven; some of it was just plain wrong. One Muslim writer noted in a book about India that Hindu mathematics was “a mixture of pearl shells and sour dates . . . of costly crystal and common pebbles.”
“By the twentieth century, the pearl shells and crystal had long lain buried in the dust of time. For centuries, India had stood its mathematical ground against the rest of the world. But now, that was ancient history; of late it had added little to the world’s mathematical treasure. Only a line of brilliant mathematicians in Kerala, on the subcontinent’s southwest tip, broke the gloom that otherwise extended back to the great Bhaskara of the twelfth century. The birth of the Mathematical Society could not ensure a rebirth. But its founders—hungry to connect with the West, proud of their country’s heritage yet soberly aware that reverence for the past was no substitute for present achievement—surely hoped it did.
It was into this nascent new world that Ramanujan “came out,” as it were, as a mathematician in 1911.”
