Indians often boast that the śulba sūtra-s (manuals for masons to construct fire altars) “state the Pythagorean theorem before Pythagoras”. To the contrary, our NCERT school texts summarily reject all non-Western geometry as inferior. Who is right? Neither! The key instrument of śulba-sūtra geometry is the śulba (or rajju) or string, which differs manifestly from the geometry box (compass box) used in schools today. The corresponding concepts of point, line, angle, proof (and math) etc. are all fundamentally different, as will be explained in the talk, using...

Mathematics is NOT universal. Indian ganita was practical, hence accepted facts, and empirical proofs, as does science. But Western mathematics was religiously oriented, since Pythagoreans and Plato who explicitly related math to mathesis and the soul, and declared this religious math to be “superior” to practically-oriented math. The church transformed this religious understanding of math in two ways. During the Crusades, it (a) accepted “reason”, as part of Christian theology (mimicking Islamic rational theology). Its aim was to use “universal” reason to...