This is going to test HN's tolerance for myths and pseudo-science, but then it's a Sunday. "It has a self-contained master-key for extending the evaluation to any number of decimal places." is not going to convince many people here.
There are many alternate views on the origin of this verse itself. The one I find most believable, is that this is a fairly recent fabrication [1]. There is nothing to suggest that we had this level of accuracy that far back. For instance, how was this arrived at? Methods? None. But much later, _in the 5th century AD_, Aryabatta used a simpler expansion for which we actually have some evidence.
Just like most other religious texts, the Vedas don't stand up to modern science and rigor. You'll see plenty of revivalist material on the web; many here in India hold it in high regard. In my view, its lasting significance has been the role in dividing India into castes. From the priests to the serfs, a system that continues to hurt even today.
The verse 'gopi bhagya' basically follows Katapayadi system[0]. Earliest known usage of Katapayadi system was in 683 AD. That verse is from a 1965 book called "Vedic Mathematics" by Bharati Krishna Tirtha Maharaja[1].
The Quora blog you linked has issues with terminologies and timelines of this specific "Vedic Mathematics" book - such as calling these mental calculation techniques and tricks as Vedic even though there are no references to them in Vedas[2]. This is more of a political matter ;) And, it's already pointed out in the article linked by OP[3]. I'm quoting it here:
It must be pointed out that these sutras given by Tirtha Maharaja are created by the author himself, as stated in the introduction to his book, "Vedic Mathematics" (published posthumously) and are therefore not actually Vedic.
These mathematical sutras are Vedic only in the sense that they are inspired by the Vedas in the mind of one dedicated to the Vedas. Thus the title "Vedic Mathematics" is not correct.
/Just like most other religious texts, the Vedas don't stand up to modern science and rigor/ -- There is no such thing as modern science. Its the same universe that existed billions of years ago and with our "thought process" we are able to understand it better (compared to what was written in the past) and are calling it modern now. Go forward 100 years and look back at current science. What is it called as now ?
/dividing india into castes by religion/ -- This is completely humans fault. What Bhagavadgita explained were the variety of things people do to get tired/frustrated in this place and get enlightened. Look at the meaning of division without the caste mirror. You see the same set of things happening everywhere in the world. a) People who are good at protecting others b) People who are good at taking care of the mess created by others c) people who are good at providing things to others c) People who are good at understanding things and sharing the knowledge with society. At some point, this whole thing got misunderstood, misinterpreted and exploited for ones selfishness. We are paying the price now. But, the same things explained still holds true everywhere in the world.
> "It has a self-contained master-key for extending the evaluation to any number of decimal places."
Well, at least if someone would actually say what the freaking "master key" is, it might be intellectually delightful even if historically BS. ... but I can't find any description of what this "master key" is.
Wikipedia is not infallible but it says Sanskrit sources had one or two digits of pi:
"In India around 600 BC, the Shulba Sutras (Sanskrit texts that are rich in mathematical contents) treat π as (9785/5568)2 ≈ 3.088. In 150 BC, or perhaps earlier, Indian sources treat π as sqrt(10) ≈ 3.1622."
It must be pointed out that these sutras given by Tirtha Maharaja are created by the author himself, as stated in the introduction to his book, "Vedic Mathematics" (published posthumously) and are therefore not actually Vedic.
These mathematical sutras are Vedic only in the sense that they are inspired by the Vedas in the mind of one dedicated to the Vedas. Thus the title "Vedic Mathematics" is not correct.
I'm in a random mood, so here are random pi facts:
Inscribe a circle within a square. Choose random points within the square. As the number of points approaches infinity, the number of points that fall within the circle divided by the total number of points, times four, is pi. http://mathfaculty.fullerton.edu/mathews//n2003/montecarlopi...
Memorizing something like the first 8 digits of pi is enough to calculate the circumference of the Earth to within a few inches, iirc. (My memory is bad, so it's probably 8 +/- 2 digits.)
I don't think you can calculate the circumference of the Earth to within a few inches that easily because earth's topology isn't perfectly smooth. It has ups and downs all over.
Noped out of that. Considering the recent string of these Nationalist, feel Good posts, it's about time they're autobanned.
I'm Indian myself and I've done quite a bit of study on this topic.Vedic mathematics is rooted in ignorance and a disregard for proofs. It's pretty much a way for nationalists (which intensified after the british conquest) to appease and make a billion people feel good about their history. In short, it's pretty much bullshit. What Ramanujan did was math, not this hindutva propaganda crap. Next thing you know, you'll start hearing about astrology and how it's a Vedic science.
Nearly all of his findings were without proof, so what are you trying to imply here?
And about astrology, they did know about the Arundhati twin star system, so they did know something. While you are at it, blow your minds and lookup the fact that they gave a measurement of speed of light in Mahabharata.
It's not about nationalism. No offense, I don't know you but you kind of sound like all those Indians who just have to look down on everything Indian.
LOL! You do realize it's from a book titled "Vedic Mathematics", and not from the Vedas itself? Do you? Did you actually check link at the top of the article linked by OP[1]?
And, why do think it's bullshit? I don't see anything wrong in the "Vedic Mathematics" book. They are a bunch of mental calculation techniques and tricks. I'd suggest to keep this propaganda propaganda to yourself.
If someone wrote a haiku that's visible in base64 encoding and which stood for a pretty interesting number (like pi, or e or whatever) it would be worthy of a HN post for intellectual curiosity.
... but please do cut out the "Indians did this ages ago" crap, for it is the least intellectually interesting of all things ... unless the poster backs up any such claim with proper first-hand references.
As an Indian. I would request fellow Indians (who else is upvoting this?) to not encourage such posts. There's enough superstition already in the country. Let's not encourage it. Let people join and learn modern mathematics and sciences and make them study ancient texts as leisure but let's not shout there are hidden codes and blah in them.
This looks like a hoax. If you look at the decoding ring, it's more complex than the message is in the first place. There are even duplicates in their decoder ring. Sa means 4 different numbers, and 7 duplicates in their decoder ring. Using their decoder ring (using the first "meaning" of any number, I get (text, value according to their decoding, value from pi approximation) :
It's close, sure. But not better than other random stuff.
In "lorem ipsum" text, translating a->1, b->2,... you find 3141(391491322514) at position 170 onwards. And the collected works of william shakespeare (as downloaded at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/100/pg100.txt) contain the following "PI approximations" (encoded as above):
Shakespeare must have been a closet mathematical genius ! (Hmmm, I guess he lived after the discovery of Pi, ... oh well, still makes the point I guess)
Even the bible contains actual approximations to pi (for example the surprisingly accurate 22/7). It even makes sense that it does. For a lot of history the bible was effectively the only book available for a large percentage of the population (and even then, often not directly). It seems the authors knew that and included tons of relevant stuff. It contains descriptions of how "large" buildings can be built (large by medieval standards, of course). Including textual descriptions of plans for things like churches. It contains details of how to make agriculture work, when to sow, when to harvest, when to switch between grain and animals, when to ... to make land productive. We still use the 7-year land rotation rule on today's farms.
Given that the bible clearly was meant to be a sort of "civilization in a single (if massive) book", it makes sense that intuitive descriptions for pi would be one of the things found in there. Perhaps the same is true for the vedas ?
Maybe I'm putting the horse before the cart here. The situation could be reversed as well. Assuming a religion gets of the ground at all, it's survival depends on how well it's subjects do. So it's only natural that the religions that grow huge in some way things like the (approximate) value of Pi, and stuff like making agriculture work. And like in the real world you have different flavors of survival. Building, breeding, growing and defense clearly weighed heavily on the bible, vedas and buddhist texts (all of those books, for example, heavily favor not counterattacking an enemy that comes and fights for plunder, merely to let plunder run out and let the attacker starve), whereas conquest, plundering and looting predominate, for example, the quran or the original mongol religion (those religions focus on things like plunder, remaining mobile (e.g. absurd punishments for doing things to horses), and very strict rules about not directly attacking other religions (only their power on the ground). They all have rules about recruiting new cannon fodder (ie. promises of plunder for anyone who joins the religion, making it everyone's duty to recruit new members, ...). Islam actually contains rules that bear a resemblance to a multilevel marketing scheme. If you bring new members, you get a share of their loot for a while). "Growing" religions are vulnerable when they reach a large size, because at some point the borders can't expand while the population keeps growing. "Attacking" religions have the same problem any predator population does : they can only grow by destroying other populations, never by themselves. They survive as tiny inactive pockets, every now and then blowing up exponentially only to die off just as fast soon after, leaving enormous devastation (to read about this in nature, read about the history of wildlife management, or about what happened in Australia, or for a less extreme example American national parks).
Maybe we should just look at religions as just another form of life. Not "really" alive, but certainly making a huge difference in the world. (Yes, I've read Jared Diamond's books).
If a religion did not imitate a real-world survival technique it simply wouldn't survive. So there probably have been a lot of alternate versions, just almost no surviving ones.
so learn sanskrit first, learn their numeral equivalence, then you can learn pi!
In all seriousness, I've always wondered how I could learn Pi. I've seen people assimilating a word to each double digits. Then make a story out of those words.
But first you'd have to learn exactly 100 associations.
[+] [-] jeswin|12 years ago|reply
There are many alternate views on the origin of this verse itself. The one I find most believable, is that this is a fairly recent fabrication [1]. There is nothing to suggest that we had this level of accuracy that far back. For instance, how was this arrived at? Methods? None. But much later, _in the 5th century AD_, Aryabatta used a simpler expansion for which we actually have some evidence.
Just like most other religious texts, the Vedas don't stand up to modern science and rigor. You'll see plenty of revivalist material on the web; many here in India hold it in high regard. In my view, its lasting significance has been the role in dividing India into castes. From the priests to the serfs, a system that continues to hurt even today.
[1]: http://vedicmathmyth.quora.com/The-misconceptions-of-the-poe...
[+] [-] s-topper|12 years ago|reply
The Quora blog you linked has issues with terminologies and timelines of this specific "Vedic Mathematics" book - such as calling these mental calculation techniques and tricks as Vedic even though there are no references to them in Vedas[2]. This is more of a political matter ;) And, it's already pointed out in the article linked by OP[3]. I'm quoting it here:
It must be pointed out that these sutras given by Tirtha Maharaja are created by the author himself, as stated in the introduction to his book, "Vedic Mathematics" (published posthumously) and are therefore not actually Vedic.
These mathematical sutras are Vedic only in the sense that they are inspired by the Vedas in the mind of one dedicated to the Vedas. Thus the title "Vedic Mathematics" is not correct.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katapayadi_system
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_Mathematics_%28book%29
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharati_Krishna_Tirthaji#Mathem...
[3]http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/vedic-mathematics.html
[+] [-] droid5|12 years ago|reply
/dividing india into castes by religion/ -- This is completely humans fault. What Bhagavadgita explained were the variety of things people do to get tired/frustrated in this place and get enlightened. Look at the meaning of division without the caste mirror. You see the same set of things happening everywhere in the world. a) People who are good at protecting others b) People who are good at taking care of the mess created by others c) people who are good at providing things to others c) People who are good at understanding things and sharing the knowledge with society. At some point, this whole thing got misunderstood, misinterpreted and exploited for ones selfishness. We are paying the price now. But, the same things explained still holds true everywhere in the world.
[+] [-] aufreak3|12 years ago|reply
Well, at least if someone would actually say what the freaking "master key" is, it might be intellectually delightful even if historically BS. ... but I can't find any description of what this "master key" is.
[+] [-] unmole|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roywiggins|12 years ago|reply
Anyway, the source the linked article cites is
http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/vedic-mathematics.html
which notes
[+] [-] sillysaurus2|12 years ago|reply
Inscribe a circle within a square. Choose random points within the square. As the number of points approaches infinity, the number of points that fall within the circle divided by the total number of points, times four, is pi. http://mathfaculty.fullerton.edu/mathews//n2003/montecarlopi...
Memorizing something like the first 8 digits of pi is enough to calculate the circumference of the Earth to within a few inches, iirc. (My memory is bad, so it's probably 8 +/- 2 digits.)
The quadrillionth bit of pi is zero. http://www.daemonology.net/papers/
And keeping in spirit with the post, here's a pi chant: http://pi.ytmnd.com/
[+] [-] hzay|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousDog|12 years ago|reply
I'm Indian myself and I've done quite a bit of study on this topic.Vedic mathematics is rooted in ignorance and a disregard for proofs. It's pretty much a way for nationalists (which intensified after the british conquest) to appease and make a billion people feel good about their history. In short, it's pretty much bullshit. What Ramanujan did was math, not this hindutva propaganda crap. Next thing you know, you'll start hearing about astrology and how it's a Vedic science.
[+] [-] eklavya|12 years ago|reply
Nearly all of his findings were without proof, so what are you trying to imply here?
And about astrology, they did know about the Arundhati twin star system, so they did know something. While you are at it, blow your minds and lookup the fact that they gave a measurement of speed of light in Mahabharata.
It's not about nationalism. No offense, I don't know you but you kind of sound like all those Indians who just have to look down on everything Indian.
[+] [-] s-topper|12 years ago|reply
And, why do think it's bullshit? I don't see anything wrong in the "Vedic Mathematics" book. They are a bunch of mental calculation techniques and tricks. I'd suggest to keep this propaganda propaganda to yourself.
[1]http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/vedic-mathematics.html
[+] [-] aufreak3|12 years ago|reply
... but please do cut out the "Indians did this ages ago" crap, for it is the least intellectually interesting of all things ... unless the poster backs up any such claim with proper first-hand references.
[+] [-] negamax|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intull|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swatkat|12 years ago|reply
This video shows their pronunciation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8GhoAIAtt4
This structure is same in all Indian languages.
[+] [-] deepuj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnbr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kissickas|12 years ago|reply
Incidentally, I used the same technique to memorize some (fewer) digits pi in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system
[+] [-] waps|12 years ago|reply
In "lorem ipsum" text, translating a->1, b->2,... you find 3141(391491322514) at position 170 onwards. And the collected works of william shakespeare (as downloaded at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/100/pg100.txt) contain the following "PI approximations" (encoded as above):
3 => 290159 occurences 31 => 116402 occurences 314 => 7913 occurences 3141 => 3970 occurences 31415 => 1650 occurences 314159 => 39 occurences 3141592 => 8 occurences 31415926 => 0 occurences
Shakespeare must have been a closet mathematical genius ! (Hmmm, I guess he lived after the discovery of Pi, ... oh well, still makes the point I guess)
Even the bible contains actual approximations to pi (for example the surprisingly accurate 22/7). It even makes sense that it does. For a lot of history the bible was effectively the only book available for a large percentage of the population (and even then, often not directly). It seems the authors knew that and included tons of relevant stuff. It contains descriptions of how "large" buildings can be built (large by medieval standards, of course). Including textual descriptions of plans for things like churches. It contains details of how to make agriculture work, when to sow, when to harvest, when to switch between grain and animals, when to ... to make land productive. We still use the 7-year land rotation rule on today's farms.
Given that the bible clearly was meant to be a sort of "civilization in a single (if massive) book", it makes sense that intuitive descriptions for pi would be one of the things found in there. Perhaps the same is true for the vedas ?
Maybe I'm putting the horse before the cart here. The situation could be reversed as well. Assuming a religion gets of the ground at all, it's survival depends on how well it's subjects do. So it's only natural that the religions that grow huge in some way things like the (approximate) value of Pi, and stuff like making agriculture work. And like in the real world you have different flavors of survival. Building, breeding, growing and defense clearly weighed heavily on the bible, vedas and buddhist texts (all of those books, for example, heavily favor not counterattacking an enemy that comes and fights for plunder, merely to let plunder run out and let the attacker starve), whereas conquest, plundering and looting predominate, for example, the quran or the original mongol religion (those religions focus on things like plunder, remaining mobile (e.g. absurd punishments for doing things to horses), and very strict rules about not directly attacking other religions (only their power on the ground). They all have rules about recruiting new cannon fodder (ie. promises of plunder for anyone who joins the religion, making it everyone's duty to recruit new members, ...). Islam actually contains rules that bear a resemblance to a multilevel marketing scheme. If you bring new members, you get a share of their loot for a while). "Growing" religions are vulnerable when they reach a large size, because at some point the borders can't expand while the population keeps growing. "Attacking" religions have the same problem any predator population does : they can only grow by destroying other populations, never by themselves. They survive as tiny inactive pockets, every now and then blowing up exponentially only to die off just as fast soon after, leaving enormous devastation (to read about this in nature, read about the history of wildlife management, or about what happened in Australia, or for a less extreme example American national parks).
Maybe we should just look at religions as just another form of life. Not "really" alive, but certainly making a huge difference in the world. (Yes, I've read Jared Diamond's books).
If a religion did not imitate a real-world survival technique it simply wouldn't survive. So there probably have been a lot of alternate versions, just almost no surviving ones.
[+] [-] unmole|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vog|12 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piphilology#German
[+] [-] baby|12 years ago|reply
In all seriousness, I've always wondered how I could learn Pi. I've seen people assimilating a word to each double digits. Then make a story out of those words.
But first you'd have to learn exactly 100 associations.
Anyone knows of another technique ?
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vishkrishram|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]