In 1666 Isaac Newton invented calculus. This is what most of the world was taught and what most of the world still believes. There is a problem with this version of events. A mathematician in Kerala had already done it. … Read More
Author Archives: Madhusudan Narayanan
Wheat vs Rice: How Two Grains Quietly Shaped Two Indias
There is a question almost nobody asks about India, and it is more interesting than it first sounds. Why does Punjab celebrate its new year in April with bonfires and a festival built around cut wheat, while Tamil Nadu celebrates … Read More
Chanakya’s 40 Ways to Steal: Ancient India’s Fraud Detection Manual
In the year 1905, a young Sanskrit scholar named Rudrapatna Shamasastry was working through a heap of palm leaf manuscripts in the newly opened Mysore Oriental Library, cataloguing them one by one for the Maharaja’s collection. The manuscripts had arrived … Read More
One Day Chennai Tour, How to Spend Your Layover Before or After a Cruise
If you have just one day in Chennai, the question is not whether there is enough to see, it is how to choose wisely. This city sits at the meeting point of two thousand years of temple building, colonial trade, … Read More
Panini: The World’s First Programmer Wrote Code in Sanskrit, 2500 Years Before Computers Existed
In 1959 a computer scientist named John Backus invented a notation for describing the grammar of programming languages. It is called Backus Naur Form, and it is one of the foundational tools of modern computer science. Every programming language you … Read More
The Building in Kolkata That Produced Six Bengali Scientists Who Changed the World
There is a building on College Street in Kolkata. It was built in 1875. Its architecture is the confident Victorian Gothic of a colonial institution that expected to last. Tall windows. High ceilings. A sweeping central staircase. A Baker Laboratory … Read More
Mumbai to Pune Heritage Tour: Victorian Railway That 42,000 Workers Built
Every time a train leaves Mumbai and climbs through the Western Ghats toward Pune, it is using a railway line built between 1856 and 1863 by 42,000 workers on one of the most audacious civil engineering projects of the 19th … Read More
Heisenberg Tagore Kolkata: When the Uncertainity Principle met the Upanishads
On the afternoon of October 4 1929, a 28-year-old German physicist arrived at the house of a 68-year-old Indian poet in Kolkata. The physicist was Werner Heisenberg. Two years earlier he had published the uncertainty principle, one of the most … Read More
Ancient Karnataka Mathematicians: The Zero, Calculus, Algebra and a Code Still Unbroken
In 1150 CE a mathematician in Bijapur wrote the foundational concepts of differential calculus into a Sanskrit verse. Isaac Newton was born five hundred and fourteen years later. In 850 CE a Jain scholar at the court of a Karnataka … Read More
Nilgiri Mountain Railway: The UNESCO Toy Train Guide to India’s Blue Mountains
In 1854 a British engineer looked up at the Nilgiri Hills and proposed building a railway to the top. His superiors said no. He proposed it again. They said no again. He proposed it a third time. No. A fourth … Read More