Tuesday, August 14, 2007
George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester claims to have uncovered papers showing that Indian scholars described the infinite series, a cornerstone of calculus, 250 years before Newton and Leibniz. Interestingly, there is also evidence that this discovery may have been transmitted to Europeans at the time by traveling Jesuit scholars. His research is apparently part of a new (3rd) edition of his book, The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European Roots of Mathematics, which details the often-neglected and highly significant contributions of non-european mathematicians. Sounds cool.