Who was Varahamihira?Varahamihira was a 6th-century Indian astronomer, mathematician and polymath who lived and worked in Ujjain in present-day Madhya Pradesh from approximately 505 to 587 CE. He was one of the nine gems of Emperor Vikramaditya’s court and authored … Read More
Untold Stories
Sushruta: The World’s First Plastic Surgeon
Modern medicine credits plastic surgery to 20th-century European surgeons. There is a Varanasi physician who performed it in 600 BCE. His name was Sushruta. He lived and taught on the banks of the Ganges in the city now known as … Read More
Aryabhata: The Ancient Indian Mathematician Who Calculated the Earth’s Rotation
In the year 499 CE, a twenty-three-year-old mathematician in Kusumapura, the ancient city that is now Patna in Bihar, finished writing a book. The book was called the Aryabhatiya. It was written in Sanskrit verse. It was 121 stanzas long. … Read More
God Particle India: The Kolkata Physicist Behind Higgs Boson
On the morning of July 4 2012, scientists at CERN in Geneva announced one of the most significant discoveries in the history of physics. After a quest spanning nearly half a century, physicists had found a new subatomic particle consistent … Read More
Ancient Indian Philosophy and Quantum Physics: The Nobel Connection
In October 2022 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to three scientists, Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum … Read More
Kanada’s Atomic Theory: The Ancient Indian Philosopher Who Discovered the Atom 2600 Years Before John Dalton
John Dalton is credited with discovering atomic theory in 1808. He was 2600 years late. In approximately 600 BCE, in a small town near what is now Dwaraka in Gujarat, a philosopher named Kanada sat down, wrote the Vaisheshika Sutras … Read More
Madhava: The Kerala Mathematician Who Invented Calculus 200 Years Before Newton
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
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
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