I need volunteers to further develop these slides (and create similar ones on Hindu Contribution to the Arts, Archeology etc).
Please let me know if you have the time and the interest.

Pl also read: The Hindu Contribution to Mathematics Part 1 and Part 2

Indian Contribution to Technology

and these category of posts on Science and Technology in Ancient India. Happy Reading (and sharing!). Jai Hind, Jai Bharat!

However, in Arabic writings, vowels are omitted, and it was abbreviated as jb.

Later writers substituted it with jiab, meaning “cove” or “bay” (in Arabic, jiba is a meaningless word).

Later in the 12th century, when Gherardo of Cremona translated these writings from Arabic into Latin, he replaced the Arabic jiab with its Latin counterpart, sinus, which means “cove” or “bay”. And after that, the sinus became sine in English.

Related Posts: Does no one remember the Hindu contribution to Mathematics? and Does no one remember Indian Contribution to Mathematics – Part 2

Source: Howard Eves (1990). An Introduction to the History of Mathematics (6 ed.). Saunders College Publishing House, New York. p. 237; Image of Sine Angle: Courtesy Wikipedia

And find it odd (and saddening) that Acharya  J C Bose barely finds a small mention…(not to forget Sir C V Raman).  No photograph of Wing Cmdr Rakesh Sharma either. And no trace or mention of our own achievements in Science and Technology from ancient times…This is how an entire generation forgets history..

Thankfully, there is a good section on Chandrayaan and the space programme.

Related Posts: Does no one remember the Indian contribution to Technology?, Phototherapy in Ancient India and Forgetting History: Delhi’s “Iron Pillar”

Somewhat related: An unsung Hero – II and Need Help: Information on ancient Indian scientists

Jeffrey Armstrong is an award-winning author of numerous books on Vedic knowledge..He is a philosopher, practitioner and teacher of the Vedas for the past 40 years. He has degrees in Psychology, History & Comparative Religions, and Literature and had a successful career as an executive in Silicon Valley before turning to teaching full time. Jeffrey Armstrong (Kavindra Rishi) is the founder of VASA – Vedic Academy of Sciences & Arts in Vancouver Canada. ..(and) a global advocate for the Sanatana Dharma Culture.

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Daily Bell: How did you get interested in Indian culture and religion?

Jeffrey Armstrong: Religion is the wrong word to use for India’s teachings. Religion is a word that is more accurately applied to the Middle Eastern Abrahamic cultures. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are religions. The origin of the word religion, from the Latin, is re-legare (a legalistic system of rules given by God) or ‘bound by rules.’ Re = tied up or connected by, and ligion = legare = ligaments = to tie, bind or bandage. The usual idea is that the practitioner of a religion is bound up in rules or laws. This especially applies to the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, whereas the spiritual practices of India are called a Dharma Culture. The main difference is religions generally have one book of rules and stories whereas a Dharma culture has a library of spiritual and material knowledge aimed at understanding who we really are and how to properly use everything around us…

Daily Bell: What do you believe in and why? What application does it have to the West?

Jeffrey Armstrong: My lifelong effort has been to try to find things that are universally true rather than relatively true…

What we now call the West is the outgrowth of a tribal or city/state approach to living on the planet. This means if you take care of your tribe, you are seen as good. So, to all those tribes who were fighting against each other for thousands of years in a series of wars, that essentially meant that as long as the spoils of the wars were brought back and shared amongst the tribe, they were good. Alexander the Great was a prime example of this. He went out to rape, pillage and conquer, and was a monster to the rest of the world, but was considered great by his people, hence the name…India, on the other hand, is the only culture of its size in the world that has never gone out and tried to spread its beliefs by war. In fact, it has consistently given shelter to anyone from any culture. So, to compare histories, the west is a competitive, war-based civilization and India has been a nurturing, cooperation-based civilization on an epic scale…

Daily Bell: Are there lost Indian cities under the sea?

Jeffrey Armstrong: There is at least one that was discovered in 2001 in the Bay of Cambay, which is off the west coast of India. In a routine, environmental scan of the bottom of the sea, a city was discovered which turns out to have the largest megalithic stones of any city in ancient times; artifacts were dated to about 10,000 years ago. ..The city sits in about 150 feet of water, which indicates it was built before the last melting of the polar ice caps, which most geologists date conservatively at about 12,000 years ago. It appears to have had a building format similar to the cities of Harappa and Mohendro Daro (3000-5000 BCE), which were previously thought to be the oldest cities of India ..But this underwater city off the coast of India suggests, conservatively, 15,000 years of sophisticated human history in India.

Daily Bell: Did the ancient Indians know how to fly and to build flying machines? Are there replicas of these machines on the tops of ancient temples?

Jeffrey Armstrong: On the latter question, I am not sure I have heard that there are replicas of the airplanes or Vimanas as they were referred to in the epic histories of India. But there are two Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two epic poems that supposedly took place 5,000 years ago and over 1.2 million years ago in India, and the Ramayana actually begins with a scene in which a very sophisticated stolen airplane is being flown all over the Earth. Such ancient stories, thousands and thousands of years old, have no logical reason for talking about airplanes in any modern sense. Yet they do.

…Daily Bell: Did ancient Indians consort with aliens and travel through time or to other dimensions?

Jeffrey Armstrong: The cosmology of India describes our universe as having fourteen parallel realities on multiple levels, all existing and intersecting within the material realm in which we are currently living.

One of those levels is called the Deva realm. The Deva realm is supposedly the home of the beings who actually conduct the laws of nature to which we are subject. This view of Divine helpers is much misunderstood as the so-called many gods or also as demi-gods, but in India they were never viewed as God, gods, demi-gods or in competition with God. They were, instead, viewed as souls (or more accurately atmas) like us, but living on another plane of material reality and performing specific jobs as administrators of the laws of nature. So, gods is the wrong word for many reasons, the main one being it implies ‘God,’ which is not an Indian word in the first place. These beings are called Devas, meaning beings who ‘work in the light’ assisting the Supreme Being by enforcing the laws of nature that allow the universe to function as it does.

…So as for the alien question, it was always the view in India that there are other dimensions of intelligent life in our universe who communicate with humans and that the Devas specifically are the intelligences operating behind the laws of Nature. …The Vedas describe infinitely multiple universes filled with many Earth-like and other diverse planets and many kinds of intelligent beings living in these other dimensions, some in contact with this realm.

The closest modern analogs are found in some of the theories of quantum physics, one being string theory, which suggests there are something like eleven parallel realities that are running simultaneously with ours. This idea in physics, of parallel realities crisscrossing, is undeniably reminiscent of the ancient teachings from India…

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Somewhat Related: Of Vimanas and Time Travel and Where is Krishana’s Dwaraka? by Varnam

K. Ramasubramanian is the head of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) research Cell for Indian Science and Technology in Sanskrit (CISTS), the only one of its kind in the country, where doctoral students translate the work of ancient Indian scientists into English, study language technology in Sanskrit that will help computers to analyse a wide range of speech and text, and make the translation and interpretation of Sanskrit texts easy.

…“No country should allow the distortion of its own history,” said Murli Manohar Joshi, former Union minister for human resource development, who had directed all the IIT campuses to set up a CISTS in 2002. Following the directive, IIT-B appointed Kulkarni to spearhead research in Sanskrit language technology in 2003. A year later, the institute brought Ramasubramanian on board.

His students are now at different stages of translating primary Sanskrit texts (dating between the seventh and 15th centuries) of the Kerala School mathematics…All these texts work on the same principles, but work on different timescales. For instance, “Siddhanta texts help predict astronomical positions for a mahayuga (great age), which is about 4,320,000 years. The intermediate Tantra texts work with a yuga, one-tenth of that time—432,000 years. Finally, the Karna texts help quick calculations for as little as one month. My students are working with all three of these texts,” said Ramasubramanian.

…But not every member of the team has scientific training. One of them is a trained astrologer and delighted to read the future. Dinesh Mohan Joshi, (grandson of an astrologer) said: “I saw my grandfather look at kundalis (a graphical representation of planetary positions at birth that charts the life course of the baby) and makes predictions. I saw them come true. I was fascinated. I wanted to be able to do that too. So, I went to (Shri) Lal Bahadur (Shastri) Sanskrit Vidyapeeth, Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth and became an acharya (teacher) there. Then a friend told me about this cell and I decided to come.” Unlike Bhatt, his was an uphill struggle to master the mathematics, “because I had no formal training in the subject”.

…And in Joshi’s struggle to learn mathematics, lies the biggest challenge that this venture faces, because “there just aren’t enough people who are skilled in both. If they know Sanskrit, they know little science. And if they are good scientists, they are not interested in Sanskrit or translation of Indian texts”, said Subramanian, explaining why, despite making an enormous effort, IIT has not been able to expand the cell.

Photograph of K. Ramasubramanian, courtesy: IIT Mumbai

Another challenge is of a different nature: Original manuscripts are either rotting or missing. “I had gone to find out some text related to my research at the Kerala University library of manuscripts when I found worms eating four of seven manuscripts. I bought lemongrass oil and gave it to the librarian who said they were too short staffed to look after the documents,” said Ramasubramanian, lamenting that it was the same story across the country. “We simply do not take our historical heritage, intellectual heritage seriously.”

…The professors and students say they have to battle for respect in a country where history, especially the history of science has little value. “Only recently, the cell has started getting more visibility, people have begun asking us to come and talk about our work. Slowly, people are becoming interested…” Kulkarni said.

Reminded me of: Does no one remember the Hindu contribution to Mathematics? and this on the Kerala School