Was Calculus Invented in India? (Q4483695)

The author starts with a negative answer to the question that is given as the title of the paper (Has he already decided the answer, before starting the investigations?). He agrees (magnanimously) that `two hundred years before Newton or Leibniz, Indian astronomers came very close to creating what we would call calculus'. He laments: `This story should also serve as a cautionary tale, for what did emerge was sterile. These mathematical discoveries led nowhere. Ultimately, they were forgotten, saved from oblivion only by modern scholars.' He concludes with `I am left wondering how much important mathematics is today known but not yet discovered, passed among a coterie of tightly knit disciples as an intriguing yet seemingly useless insight, lacking the context, the fertilizing connections, that would enable it to blossom and produce its fruit.' The reviewer feels that though the author has read a lot `about' the contribution of Kerala (Indian) mathematicians and accepts contentions like the infinite series for sine, cosine, arctangent and the like were discovered in India well over a century before their rediscovery in Europe, perhaps because of the inherent obsession or nonavailability of information, seems to have reached wrong conclusions. `Ultimately they were forgotten, saved from oblivion only by modern scholars' is factually not correct. Again it is not yet finally proved that the series for sine, cosine etc. were actually rediscovered. The reviewer would like the author to read (if he has not already done) at least the books `The Crest of the Peacock' by \textit{George Geevarghese Joseph} (Tausis 1991, 2nd ed. Princeton Univ. Press/Penguin Press (2000)), `The Golden Age of Indian Mathematics' by \textit{S. Parameswaran} (Swadeshi Science Movement, 1998) and `The Origin of Mathematics' by \textit{V. Lakshmikantham} and \textit{S. Leela} (University Press of America, 2000).