51茶馆

Abstract: It is quite remarkable that Pi谩鹿鈥�gala’s Chanda谩赂楼脜鈥好劼乻tra (circa 2nd century BCE)—the ancient Indian science of prosody—offers a beautiful confluence of the analysis of the natural poetic creations of the human mind, and mathematical reasoning. Far from being purely a study of the structure of poetry, the scholars of the antiquity seem to have had a great passion to develop a rigorous system of enumeration, pattern recognition and generation. A careful study of the text shows that the rules presented by them prefigures some of the core ideas of modern  combinatorics, binary representation, recursion, and computational logic. 

During the talk we shall explore how the prosodic tradition, starting from Pi谩鹿鈥�gala through Brahmagupta, to Hal脛聛yudha and Ked脛聛rabha谩鹿颅谩鹿颅a, cultivated an indigenous form of mathematical linguistics, blending poetic intuition with precise formulation of certain algorithms. Several questions examined by them seem to have little relevance to practical application, but arise primarily from the pursuit of intellectual curiosity. Particularly, there was a great joy in figuring out the significance of large numbers like 13,42,17,726 and 8,19,20,000 that appear in some of the texts pertaining to prosody. Recognizing these contributions invites us to seriously rethink of the global history of computation, that could possibly acknowledge the poetic origins of algorithmic thought too!

About the Speaker: Prof. K. Ramasubramanian is a Professor at the Cell for Indian Science and Technology in Sanskrit (CISTS) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. A world-class scholar of great repute with a unique combination of expertise in sciences, Sanskrit, and spirituality. As a historian of Indian mathematics and astronomy, a Sanskrit scholar, a Vedic teacher, and a philosopher, his unparalleled multi-disciplinary scholarship and popular teachings have inspired thousands of students and teachers to preserve and revive India’s knowledge heritage.

We look forward to your active participation.