• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 663 0

Professional abacus operators felt threatened by the easier counting method, for one thing. (They would have been the first to realize that the decimal system was essentially the abacus with written symbols.) On top of that, Fibonacci’s book appeared during the period of the Crusades against Islam, and the clergy was suspicious of anything with Arab connotations. Some, in fact, considered the new arithmetic the Devil’s work precisely because it was so ingenious. A fear of Arabic numerals is revealed through the etymology of some modern words. From zephyr came ‘zero’ but also the Portuguese word chifre, which means ‘[Devil] horns’, and the English word cipher, meaning ‘code’. It has been argued that this was because using numbers with a zephyr, or zero, was done in hiding, against the wishes of the Church.

Arithmetica, the spirit of arithmetic, adjudicates between Boethius, who is using Arabic numerals, and Pythagoras, who has a counting board. Her adoring gaze and the numbers on her dress give away which method she prefers. From a woodblock engraving in Greorius Reisch’s Margarita Philosophica (1503).

In 1299 Florence banned Arabic numerals because, it was said, the slinky symbols were easier to falsify than solid Roman Vs and Is. A 0 could easily become a 6 or 9, and a 1 morph seamlessly into a 7. As a consequence, it was only around the end of the fifteenth century that Roman numerals were finally superseded, though negative numbers took much longer to catch on in Europe, gaining acceptance only in the seventeenth century, because they were said to be used in calculations of illegal money-lending, or usury, which was associated with blasphemy. In places where no calculation is needed, however, such as legal documents, chapters in books and dates at the end of BBC programmes, Roman numerals still live on.

With the adoption of Arabic numbers, arithmetic joined geometry to become part of mathematics in earnest, having previously been more of a tool used by shopkeepers, and the new system helped open the door to the scientific revolution.

A more recent Indian contribution to the world of numbers is a set of arithmetical tricks collectively known as Vedic Mathematics. It was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century by a young swami, Bharati Krishna Tirthaji, who claimed to have found them in the Vedas, which was rather like, say, a vicar announcing he had found a method for solving quadratic equations in the Bible. Vedic Mathematics is based on the following list of 16 aphorisms, or sutras, which Tirthaji said were not actually written in any passage of the Vedas, instead being detectable only ‘on the basis of intuitive revelation’.

By one more than the one before

All from 9 and the last from 10

Vertically and Cross-wise

Transpose and Apply

If the Samuccaya is the Same it is Zero

If One is in Ratio the Other is Zero

By Addition and by Subtraction

By the Completion or Non-Completion

Differential Calculus

By the Deficiency

Specific and General

The Remainders by the Last Digit

The Ultimate and Twice the Penultimate

By One Less than the One Before

The Product of the Sum

All the Multipliers

Was he serious? Yes, and very much so too. Tirthaji was one of the most respected holy men of his generation. A former child prodigy, graduating in Sanskrit, philosophy, English, maths, history and science at the age of 20, he was also a talented orator who, it became clear early into adulthood, was destined to take a prominent role in Indian religious life. In 1925 Tirthaji was indeed made a Shankaracharya, one of the senior positions in traditional Hindu society, in charge of a nationally important monastery in Puri, Orissa, on the Bay of Bengal. This is the town thatI was visiting, the focus of the Rath Yatra chariot festival, where I was hoping to meet the incumbent Shankaracharya, who is the current ambassador for Vedic Mathematics.

In his role as Shankaracharya in the 1930s and 1940s, Tirthaji regularly toured India, giving sermons to crowds of tens of thousands, usually dispensing spiritual