Reflections

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 ...

Kalingrad Today The Russian city of Kalingrad is a seaport and lies in a Russian enclave bordering Poland and Lithuania. In the eighteenth century this city was in the Prussian empire and known as Konigsberg. This city was founded in 1254 by a group of Teutonic knights under the order of King Ottoker II. After the Second World War, it came under Soviet rule and was renamed after Michael Kalinin one of the heroes of the Russian Revolution. Konigsberg had a special geographic peculiarity. It lay on 4 separate landmasses, two of which were islands and the other two the banks of the River Pregel. One of the islands, Kniephof lay at the junction of Pregel and the Pregolya river. During the heyday of the Prussian empire, the four landmasses were connected by 7 bridges. These bridges were named the Blacksmith’s bridge, Connecting Bridge, Green Bridge, Merchant’s Bridge, Wooden Bridge and High Bridge. The outer landmasses were connected by 3 bridges each, while the central ...