Indian Mathematics - Charges of Eurocentrism

Charges of Eurocentrism

It has been suggested that Indian contributions to mathematics have not been given due acknowledgement in modern history and that many discoveries and inventions by Indian mathematicians were known to their Western counterparts, copied by them, and presented as their own original work; and further, that this mass plagiarism has gone unrecognized due to Eurocentrism. According to G. G. Joseph:

takes on board some of the objections raised about the classical Eurocentric trajectory. The awareness is all too likely to be tempered with dismissive rejections of their importance compared to Greek mathematics. The contributions from other civilizations - most notably China and India, are perceived either as borrowers from Greek sources or having made only minor contributions to mainstream mathematical development. An openness to more recent research findings, especially in the case of Indian and Chinese mathematics, is sadly missing"

The historian of mathematics, Florian Cajori, suggested that he and others "suspect that Diophantus got his first glimpse of algebraic knowledge from India." However, he also wrote that "it is certain that portions of Hindu mathematics are of Greek origin".

More recently, as discussed in the above section, the infinite series of calculus for trigonometric functions (rediscovered by Gregory, Taylor, and Maclaurin in the late 17th century) were described (with proofs) in India, by mathematicians of the Kerala school, remarkably some two centuries earlier. Some scholars have recently suggested that knowledge of these results might have been transmitted to Europe through the trade route from Kerala by traders and Jesuit missionaries. Kerala was in continuous contact with China and Arabia, and, from around 1500, with Europe. The existence of communication routes and a suitable chronology certainly make such a transmission a possibility. However, there is no direct evidence by way of relevant manuscripts that such a transmission actually took place. According to David Bressoud, "there is no evidence that the Indian work of series was known beyond India, or even outside of Kerala, until the nineteenth century."

Both Arab and Indian scholars made discoveries before the 17th century that are now considered a part of calculus. However, they were not able to, as Newton and Leibniz were, to "combine many differing ideas under the two unifying themes of the derivative and the integral, show the connection between the two, and turn calculus into the great problem-solving tool we have today." The intellectual careers of both Newton and Leibniz are well-documented and there is no indication of their work not being their own; however, it is not known with certainty whether the immediate predecessors of Newton and Leibniz, "including, in particular, Fermat and Roberval, learned of some of the ideas of the Islamic and Indian mathematicians through sources we are not now aware." This is an active area of current research, especially in the manuscripts collections of Spain and Maghreb, research that is now being pursued, among other places, at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris.