Kim Plofker, Union College - International Math in 18th-century India

Collaboration in mathematics has a long history.Kim Plofker, associate professor of mathematics at Union College, examines this.Faculty Bio:Kim Plofker is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. She received her doctorate from the Department of the History of Mathematics at Brown University in 1995. Her research focuses on the history of mathematics and astronomy in India and its connections with Islamic and early modern European science. Kim Plofker’s books include Mathematics in India (Princeton, 2009); (with Anuj Misra and Clemency Montelle) The Sanskrit Astronomical Table Text Brahmatulyasarini (Brill, 2021); and (with Clemency Montelle and Glen Van Brummelen) From Samarqand to Jaipur: Evolving al-Kashi’s Approximation to the Sine of One Degree (Springer, 2025).Transcript:When you took math tests in school, the teacher told you to keep your eyes on your own paper. But the history of mathematical sciences in the real world is full of professional scientists glancing at their neighbors’ work, and often expanding it through ingenious discoveries of their own. In the days before modern physics and the automated clocks, calendars and computers arising from it, timekeeping methods and models of the universe were major scientific enterprises, and often quite controversial. Mathematicians from many different schools and cultures competed to develop theoretical models and computational techniques that were the most efficient, the most empirically accurate, or just the most impressively clever. And when they encountered a foreign visitor doing some interesting math in a different language, they called in a translator and got to work exchanging ideas. My current research focuses on a group of scholars in early 18th-century India, including Hindu and Muslim court astronomers writing in Sanskrit and Persian respectively, as well as European Jesuit missionaries bringing printed books in Latin. This was barely a century after the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition, so scientific hypotheses about the earth orbiting the sun instead of vice versa, and planets moving in elliptical orbits, were still somewhat debatable issues even in European astronomy. The Indian court astronomers were intrigued by these ideas although maybe not totally convinced, while the European visitors in turn were fascinated by some of the ingenious mathematical methods of their hosts. My colleagues and I are reading the manuscripts they created to find out more about how they put their ideas together.Read More:[Springer Nature] - From Samarqand to Jaipur Evolving al-Kāshī’s Approximation to the Sine of One Degree This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org