Aarticle in Vijaykarnatka today

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Balachandra Rao

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Jun 1, 2013, 7:16:19 AM6/1/13
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Please find attached my brief article on Vedanga Jyotisha appearing
in today's (June 1, 2013) issue of Vijaya Karnataka.
Regards,
Balachandra Rao

Sunil G.R.

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Jun 3, 2013, 4:28:21 AM6/3/13
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Nice informative article sir. And congrats on the release of one more book :). Will buy it whenever i visit Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan.

Meanwhile i have this doubt and asked this few days back. But did not get any reply from anyone. So trying it here again.

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One of the basic doubt i have is about inventing 0 and number system.
We hear Aryabhatta invented 0 and number system. But how come till that time there was no decimal number-system?
Definitely Ramayana and Mahabharata predates Aryabhatta. And there are so many numbers involved in those epics. So how come this invention is credited to Aryabhatta?
Also, are there any numbers in any of the mantra of Vedas? If it is, then the number-system (decimal system) had to be present during that time also right (whatever may be the vedic time, but it definitely predates Aryabhatta by many milleniue).

Looking for Prof. Balachandra Rao's view here.

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Thanks,
Sunil.

Harshad RJ

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Jun 3, 2013, 4:51:31 AM6/3/13
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Sunil,

Decimal number system might have been developed later, but that doesn't mean that other number systems were not possible (for example, roman number system).

The earlier texts could have quoted numbers by name (like thousand, million, crores, etc), or some numeric system like roman-numerals (1000 + 50  + 2) instead of the decimal 1052.

In fact in the so called vedic arithmetic that is taught today (I don't know how authentic it is), that is how you represent numbers. If you want to multiply 105 by 99 you express it as (100 + 5) and (100 - 1) and then you can use a simplification of the sort (a + b) x (a + c) = a*a + a*(b+c) + bc

Since a is typically a power of ten it is much easier to multiply:
10000 + 400 + (-5)

And if you want to further multiply it, you will again use a similar method rather than dealing with the collapsed number 10395.

I am free wheeling a bit here. Not sure if this is exactly how ancients worked with numbers before Zero was invented, but it seems plausible.


--
Harshad RJ

Harshad RJ

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Jun 3, 2013, 4:59:11 AM6/3/13
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Btw, in my examples, I am using zeroes, but that is not how the numbers would have been written back then. It would be something like 1 thousand + fifty + 2

--
Harshad RJ

Sunil G.R.

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Jun 3, 2013, 5:01:08 AM6/3/13
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Thanks Harshad for the reply. Even the article it is written as 28 starts were there in 'taittireeya samhita'. The number 28 itself is enough right to say decimal system was present long before Aryabhatta?
Also numbers like ekadashi (11), dwadashi (12), shodasha (16) are very popular.

- Sunil.
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