Calculus was Created 250 years before Newton… in India!!

Remember in our school we were told that Marconi discovered wireless?  Well, it turns out that was nonsense!  It was really Jagdish Chandra Bose.  Marconi usurped the credit to himself.. and the Western world complied because Bose was a citizen of colonized people!  (MIT paper . Sciencemag) [Chronology of Events].

Well, that wasn’t the only thing for which the Europeans just took the credit shamelessly.  Now it turns out even Calculus was invented at least 250 years before Newton in India!  (We all know that don’t we?).  Newton just seemed to have stumbled on it a few centuries late.. (or stolen from the various manuscripts of Indian scriptures that were stolen anyways – who knows??). [story credit to Raj]

Researchers in England may have finally settled the centuries-old debate over who gets credit for the creation of calculus.

For years, English scientist Isaac Newton and German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz both claimed credit for inventing the mathematical system sometime around the end of the seventeenth century.

Now, a team from the universities of Manchester and Exeter says it knows where the true credit lies — and it’s with someone else completely.

The "Kerala school," a little-known group of scholars and mathematicians in fourteenth century India, identified the "infinite series" — one of the basic components of calculus — around 1350.

Dr. George Gheverghese Joseph, a member of the research team, says the findings should not diminish Newton or Leibniz, but rather exalt the non-European thinkers whose contributions are often ignored.

"The beginnings of modern maths is usually seen as a European achievement but the discoveries in medieval India between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries have been ignored or forgotten," he said. "The brilliance of Newton’s work at the end of the seventeenth century stands undiminished — especially when it came to the algorithms of calculus.