The Magic of Vedic Mathematics

I was somewhat pleasantly surprised to watch a TED video on vedic mathematics. There has been some controversy around this in recent years.

BACKGROUND

The Adi Shankaracharya established four schools in four corners of India, North, South, East and West. The head of these schools traditionally take the title of Shankaracharya. These people are of very high learning and well versed in science as well as philosophy. However one of them was exceptionally talented, Bharati Krishna Tirath passed post graduation in 7 subjects from American College of Science in Rochester New york at the age of 20. Mathematics was his favorite subject.

In 1948 he claimed to have discovered a Sanskrit Shloka (couplet consisting of two lines) which contained formulas for making mathematics very easy and entirely mental, never requiring more than two steps for an answer. He wrote volumes on it including modern algebraic proof of all the formulas. However the manuscript was lost in 1955. He started again in 1956 and completed the explanation of 16 formulas, including the algebraic proof. In 1958 while traveling by sea to deliver a lecture at UCLA, he fell ill and never recovered. He passed away in 1960, upon his return to India. The Vedic Mathematics though partly available to us through those 16 formulas remains incomplete as the calculus part is not there, which he claimed. A compilation of his findings was published in a book form in 1965, by one of his disciples. The keys that he used to interpret the meaning of Sanskrit words remained a secret and died with him.

THE MAGIC OF VEDIC MATHEMATICS

However on the scholarly papers website arxiv.org there is a scathing criticism of it.

What do you think of it?

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ModeratorPermalink Reply by John on July 27, 2013 at 11:56am

hi -

I studied that some in the early 80's.

He also gives a vedic numerical code (each sanskrit letter assigned an integer) that is interesting. There is a short sanskrit story which yields pi to .. hundred places , or more (forgot). The concept was the story is easy to memorize, hence the value of pi is remembered.

It is rather fun to multiple either right-to-left or left-to-right etc. Depending upon the numbers in the problems, one also has several approaches and a few are really easy and fast.

There are a few Mathematicians extending the work he published. I bought those maybe a decade ago. (sold at printing cost by the researchers.

One criticism is that in several problems one must be able to do partial sums in the head; not hard, except for long numbers.

I believe the trigonometry has been reconstructed; also some calculus.

anyway it is interesting. His published work that explains it does have several errors (printing).

thanks for the post!

John

I remember 9 sutras were given in his one published book. But, sixteen were available to complete the various fields in math. ~7 are still not known?? I am behind on this subject. (I'll listen to the talk)

I have not looked at this for years.

his book on Vedic Metaphysics covers his trip through the US -- mostly, it refers to Vedic Math.

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Permalink Reply by Capt. Anand Kumar on July 28, 2013 at 12:14am

The key and how the value of pi is obtained through it from a shloka which otherwise appears to be an innocent prayer is explained here. But the difficulty lies in identifying the shlokas where this key could be applied.