Opinion - Letters to the Editor   

Mathematics revisited

Sir, — I refer to A. M. Shaljan's article on introduction of ethno-mathematical perspective in the school curriculum (Aug. 5). His king's bidding to Archimedes to find the purity of gold in the crown without melting it might have led to the laws of Hydrostatics. And Galileo's defiance of the Church might have given rise to the heliocentric theory of planetary motion. Ancient Indian mathematics was probably related to astronomical phenomena like eclipses and equinoxes.

But it is also true that many mathematical ideas grew out of sheer intellectual curiosity. The Greeks knew almost all the important properties of conic sections although their use surfaced 18 centuries later. One can give several examples to show that the evolution of mathematical concepts was neither ethnocentric nor need-based.

Prof. K. Sitaram,
Tirupati, A.P.

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