Reflections

Sitala Mata: the Goddess of Smallpox  The history of medicine in India has always interested me. Not that I have ever put in any sustained study of the subject, but I do always look up any article that comes to my notice. Someday, when I have more time, I am going to study this more seriously (and travel more widely, write a book on Himalayan wildflowers, take superb bird pictures and grow vegetables among many other things). However in my studies, such as they are, it is apparent that the History Department of the University of Burdwan appears to be in the forefront of such research. I recently read an article written by the head of the Department, Dr Arabinda Samanta. This paper examined the prevention of smallpox in Bengal in the nineteenth century and it contained some information that really made me sit up. I was always under the impression that the prevention of smallpox dated from Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination. I knew, of course that there were some de...

Bakshali Numericals  ( Source: Wikipedia)  The greatest mathematical discovery of all time was undoubtedly the invention of Zero. This allowed mathematicians and common people to make calculations easily and conveniently, calculations that were otherwise so complex that even very intelligent people floundered in making them. As Bailey and Borwein put it in a major article published in 2011, it was a discovery that eluded the greatest minds of the Western civilizations, mathematicians of the caliber of Archimedes, and unsurprisingly was resisted fiercely by Western mathematicians when they were first introduced to it by the Arabs and even today is often ascribed to sources other than the right one. As the French historian Georges Ifrah describes it ““Now that we can stand back from the story, the birth of our modern number-system seems a colossal event in the history of humanity, as momentous as the mastery of fire, the development of agriculture, or the invention of ...