{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Incredible India Travel | Social Impact & Culture Tours","title":"Ancient Karnataka Mathematicians: They Invented Calculus Before Europe Was Ready","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1210,"description":"Europe discovered calculus in the 17th century.A mathematician from Bijapur in Karnataka had described its foundational concepts five hundred years earlier.Europe developed modern algebra in the Renaissance.A Jain mathematician working under a Rashtrakuta king in Karnataka had already written the most comprehensive algebra textbook in the ancient world.Europe credits the decimal system to the Arabs.A mathematician from Karnataka was the first person in recorded human history to write numbers using the Hindu decimal system with a circle for zero.And in a monastery somewhere in ancient Karnataka, a Jain monk was constructing a 600,000-verse literary work encoded entirely in numerical ciphers, using substitution and transposition matrices so sophisticated that modern cryptographers have identified them as precursors to contemporary block cipher encryption. After a thousand years the work has still not been fully decoded.Four scholars. One Indian state. Contributions to mathematics, astronomy, algebra, calculus, cryptography and the decimal system that changed the intellectual history of the world.In this episode we tell the complete story of all four ancient Karnataka mathematicians and the extraordinary heritage landscape where their work was done.We begin with Bhaskara I, the 7th-century mathematician who was the first person in recorded human history to write a zero as a circle, the single most consequential notational innovation in the history of mathematics. Every calculation performed on every computer, every smartphone and every financial system on earth traces directly to the moment Bhaskara I placed a small circle in a Sanskrit manuscript in Karnataka in 629 CE.We continue with Mahavira, the 9th-century Jain mathematician who worked at the court of the Rashtrakuta king Amoghavarsha and wrote the Ganitasarasangraha, the first text in recorded human history devoted entirely to mathematics. Mahavira was the first person to separate mathematics from astrology...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/eWrZ3doNBWF40S0S56sC17IDwfhLRtHiDkqKOrNCvtA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85Yjg5/Y2Q3ODM2NzZkOTcz/NGJiMWMwMDEzMTFl/YjI3NC5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}