hello hello and welcome, welcome to another edition of the Sham Sharma show. thank
you very much for joining us today, thank you very much for watching I appreciate
you. so there's always been this narrative that the Arab world and the
Muslim world initially came up with all these discoveries and they passed on
these discoveries on to Europe which eventually led to the ushering in of the
European Renaissance. but in this prevalent narrative what a lot of people
don't realize is that these discoveries that are being attributed to the Muslim
world are actually translations of earlier work that are already being done
in either Greece or India. now look I'm not here trying to say that the Muslim
world initially did not achieve anything did not do anything they were useless
I'm not here to say that. what I'm here to say is let's give credit where credit
is due the Islamic world initially translated a lot of these works that
were done in Greece in India and then of course added to it and then they were
also responsible for transmitting this information to Europe. usually in popular
discussions internationally, India doesn't get close to the credit that it
deserves for coming up with the concepts and with the discoveries that it did and
they're often wrongfully attributed to the Islamic world. so this video is going
to be an attempt to give credit where credit is due. visited Baghdad and
carried with him a small library including a book titled Surya Siddhanta and
works of Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta. the Caliph of Baghdad al-mansour
charged Al Fazari with the translation into Arabic of the works of Aryabhatta
and Brahmagupta. this translation later became famous as the Sindhhind
al-kabir. influence of Ptolemei's Almageste as well as the results of the
observations that were made by the astronomers of the House of Wisdom of
Baghdad were also found in these translations.
Al Karaji paid much attention to addition subtraction and to the
extraction of square roots of irrational and numerical polynomials, matters in
which the Indian mathematician Bhaskara also distinguished himself these
concepts were also present and were explored in the Kuttaka Ganita by
Brahmagupta. it is Al Karaji himself who informs us that in his calculations
he had followed the method in the indian reckoning or the hisab al Hind
to extract square roots of known quantities, that is, of numerical
polynomials. As Samaw'al who is an ardent disciple of Al karaji
also attributed the method of division of two algebraic polynomials to the
indians. one of the great original mathematicians of islam and one of the
most celebrated scholars of the House of Wisdom at Baghdad, mohammed IBN musa Al-Khwarizmi
he also edited two versions of the Sindhind al kabir the importance
of Al Kwarizmi's translations and his work for the history of mathematics both
in the east and the west cannot be underestimated. it was this book that
gave decimal numeration the eminent place that it has since occupied. in this
work we also find the origin of the world algorithm used today to designate
any operational recipe in a given calculus and we also find the word that
has become synonymous with the most essential fields of mathematics known as
al-jabr which is translated today as algebra. in his translations and in his
work Al Kwarizmi has explicitly stated that he borrows from Indian concepts he
explains the system of numeration of the Hindus who used nine letters for all
their numbers thanks to a method which is peculiar to them. this is an
explanation of the decimal system whereas everyone knows each of the nine
digits that compose it designated by a letter has a particular value according
to the position that it occupies, that of units tens hundreds thousands tens of
thousands. the zero in fact here is a placeholder as much as a number. it moves
other numerals to the left by one place thus increasing their magnitude by a
factor of ten. zero was thus both an idea and an actual number the charisma also
provided a definition of a function of zero which again he said that he had
borrowed from the Indian methods. he said that any zero that is multiplied by any
number whatsoever is nothing there is no number results
from it that anything that is multiplied by a zero is also nothing. when Arab and
Persian thinkers learned about zero they transliterated the word in sanskrit Shunya
into a roughly corresponding arabic Sifra. in the early 1100 when arabic
works were first translated into Lattin the Adelarde of Bath called its
Cifre. a century after that fibonacci called it zephyr. this this new style of
numeration in the way of the indians made its way to spain from where it
traveled to europe and was translated into Latin in 1126. this work
revolutionized the study of mathematics and Sciences and replaced the cumbersome
Roman numerals. it is interesting to note that while Europe has christened the new
system as Arab numerals the Arab called them Hindsa, or the Indian numerals
Al Kwarizmi also talked about other calculation methods of the elementary
arithmetic operations addition subtraction multiplication division the
extraction of square roots multiplication of decimal and
sexagesimal fractions, duplication and demediation. these were all functions which
had been borrowed from India. Brahmagupta, another famous Indian
mathematician and astronomer who was also credited with helping develop the
decimal system, the 10-digit based hand system of numbering that serves the
world as the alphabet of all calculation. as mentioned before it had been
mislabeled for several centuries in the West as Arabic numerals but it was
conceived in India and transmitted to the Middle East even before the rise of
Islam. prior to the introduction of numerals from India the Islamic world
expressed numbers to a system of letters much like the Roman numeral system. in
fact the Indians had some astronomical sizes for their numbers in one of the
largest numbers that they came up with was called the Dhwajagranishamani
which was 1 followed by 421 zeroes. they had also come up with some very very
small numerations as well. one of the earliest documents describing this
Indian medium of calculation is an 11th century work by scholar and judge
Said al Andalusi of Cordoba titled Tabaqat Al-umam who also known as the
book of the categories of Nations. seen is the world's first history of science
Al-Andalusi's compendium credits the Indus Valley for great strides in the
study of numbers. the famous historian al biruni that travelled to India also
wrote that the Hindus do not use the letters of their alphabet for numerical
notation as we use Arabic letters in the order of the Hebrew alphabet. the
numerical signs which we use are derived from the finest forms of the Hindu
science. The Arabs, too, stop with the thousand those however,
who go beyond the thousand in their numerical system are the Hindus. even the
sign and coss functions of trigonometry were important mathematical concepts
imported from India why a translation of texts like the Aryabhattiya and the
Surya Siddhanta from Sanskrit into Arabic and then from Arabic to Latin and
then transmitted into Europe. even in astronomy there were many things that
the Arabs borrowed from the Indians. al-biruni himself wrote that the Indians
had a concept that the planet was round. he said after reading Brahmagupta that
none of the astronomical observations are correct unless we assume the
globular shape of heaven and earth therefore we must declare that heaven is
a globe and the observation of these characteristics of the world would not
be correct unless in reality it were a globe. and al-biruni also mentioned how
the Indians believe that the earth is the one that is actually moving around
the Sun. he also talks about how the Indians believe that there is a force
that is keeping all things attracted to the center of the earth.
Brahmagupta's work gained popularity and influence in the Middle East where
calculating solar and lunar cycles and positions was part of workday routines
and it was translated more than once into Arabic. just like the British used
Greenwich as the prime meridian Brahmagupta in his work used the city of
Ujjain as its prime meridian. and even in a lot of the Arabic works initially when
it was first translated from India Ujjain was kept at the Prime Meridian. this
was also done by al-khwarizmi in the Zij-As-Sindhind. Al-Fazari also translated
Brahmagupta's Brahma Sphuta Siddhanta, which provided mathematic evidence for
calculating planetary epicycles and their positions and even diameters of
the Sun earth and the moon. Severus Sebokht, a seventh century Syrian
bishop and natural philosopher wrote about the knowledge of the Indians: he said
their subtle discoveries in the science of astronomy, discoveries which
are more ingenious than those of the Greeks and the Babylonians. their
valuable method of calculation their computing that surpasses description. I
wish only to say that this computation is done by means of nine signs. if
those who believe because they speak Greek that they have reached the limits
of science then they should know these things.
again it is important again it is important to give credit where credit is
due Indian scientists and Indian
mathematicians and Indian astronomers and Indian medical scientists have had
come up with some groundbreaking discoveries that had formed part of the
basis for the modern scientific revolution and it is very important that
the credit is given where credit is due. I'm not doubting that the Muslim world
obviously added to this knowledge but it is very important to remember that a lot
of this knowledge was initially transmitted from India to the Arab world
and then from there to Europe. again guys thank you very much for watching today's
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