Mādhava of Saṅgamagrāma#Madhava
A figure from the books
#Madhava Of Sangamagrama
Mādhava of Saṅgamagrāma · c. 1340–1425
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Mathematics and astronomy — founder of the Kerala school, the longest-running research lineage in Indian science.
“A teacher in a fourteenth-century Kerala village invented the essential move of calculus — taming the infinite with controlled error — and we know it only because his students' students spent two hundred years quoting him, proving him, and writing him down.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“You can never finish computing π or a sine — so stop trying to finish. Describe the unending process exactly, as an infinite series, and control the error of stopping wherever you stop. That is the central machinery of calculus, built two and a half centuries before Newton and Leibniz.”
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