Zero and Pi
About This Book
Published as two linked parts, this book follows the histories of zero and pi from the Neolithic period up to the nineteenth century. It also challenges the common view that Johann Heinrich Lambert, in 1761, single-handedly proved pi to be irrational, and instead credits him jointly with André Marie Legendre, whose work dates to 1794. The first part, which runs through six chapters, examines how the symbol O moved from Vedic ritual, where it stood for the universe as an object of meditation on Brahman, the supreme space described in the Upanishads, into mathematics. There it came to represent an unknown quantity and, together with a dot, the number zero, in a setting shaped by atheism. The author also traces how zero notation and the decimal Indian numerals, enriched by Brahmagupta's algebra, reached China and Europe through Arabia, and follows the concept to the form it takes today. Because leading historians of mathematics hold differing views, often built on conjecture, the author aims to settle the long-running debate. Appendices give the Sanskrit verses with English transliteration and meanings, along with the mathematical derivations cited in the main text. The second part, in five chapters, approaches pi as a subject woven through the rises and falls of world history, drawing together current information from many historical fields. It describes the Indus Valley, in the fourth millennium BC, as the origin of defining pi as the ratio at which a wheel's rim is three times its diameter. It also covers the Chinese progress on squaring the circle by classical methods, Indian mathematics combined with astronomy as it spread along Buddhist routes, and India's recognition of the circumference-to-diameter ratio as a non-Euclidean number.
ISBN: 9789819930715
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