Brahmagupta

And let me Asura you that I take cultural sensitivity seriously, as you can see by my ready use of wordplay.

Anyway, it's Brahmagupta, or Brahmers to his mates.

But first...

I recently attended the P&A conference, that is, Precision and Accuracy.

The only talk that was well attended was the keynote speech called both accurate and precise.

I had an allocated seat in 7B, doors open at 7, talk starts at 7.30. What's the moral of the story? Who could say? That it would be neither accurate nor precise to say the moral is that we should all be a bit less friendly? The other takeaway was that I really need to stop doing karaoke, or at least learn the accurate and precise words of the Manfred Mann's earth band hit, Blinded by the Light.

Anyway, Brahmagupta was born around 600 CE in Bihalama in modern-day Rajasthan.

For those unfamiliar, if you're looking at the map of India, it's about at 10 o'clock near the border with Pakistan.

Is it 11? Is it 1001? You just have to guess from context.

But in India, mathematicians like Brahmagupta formalized zero not just as a placeholder, but as an actual number in its own right with its own specific rules.

So it became a thing you could actually manipulate.

Yes.

Whenever you look at a phone or a computer keyboard and you see those numerals, that is an Indian invention.

In just four or five jumps, you get from Renaissance Milan with Leonardo da Vinci to Piero della Francesco in Tuscany, Fibonacci in Algeria, Al-Khwarizmi in Baghdad, and then Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta in early India.

But we are not taught this.

I think history is like a map.

And, you know, the reason we think about so much the influence of ancient Greece is because the colonial Europeans took... and brought it to the rest of the world, that educated people were expected to know Greek and Latin.

And so in America and in Australia and in all the other colonized countries, names like Pythagoras or Archimedes became familiar figures.

But Indian mathematicians who were the equal, if not the greater minds, such as Aryabhatta or Brahmagupta, are completely unknown outside India.

Today, even now, you go to...

I mean, for centuries, ancient mathematics didn't even have a concept of zero.

It was this revolutionary addition by ancient Indian mathematicians like Brahmagupta, because it represented a genuinely terrifying concept for people back then.

Which was nothingness.

Exactly.