The Indian Origins of the Calculus and its Transmission to Europe Prior to Newton and Leibniz. Part II: Lessons for Mathematics Education∗

Extended Abstract: I will only summarise the evidence for the transmission of the calculus from India to Europe in the 16th c. CE, since it has been considered elsewhere. Briefly, unlike the wild claims of transmission from “Greece”, typically advanced without serious evidence by Western historians in the last three centuries, the standard of evidence I use is a legal standard of evidence which examines motivation, opportunity, documentary, circumstantial, and epistemological evidence. The motivation was provided by the requirements of the specifically European navigational problem: precise trigonometric values were required for the calculation of the three “ells’s”—latitude, longitude, and loxodromes—and these were the focus of European navigational theorists like Pedro Nunes, Gerhard Mercator, Christoph Clavius, and Simon Stevin during the 16th and early 17th c. CE. (Navigation was critical to the production of wealth in Europe from the 16th c. onward.) The opportunity was provided by the presence of Roman Catholic missionaries in Cochin since 1500, and their spread into the interior of Kerala with the help of the indigenous Syrian Christians. By 1550, Jesuits took over the Cochin college, and not only taught Malayalam to the locals, but also learnt Sanskrit, along with mathe-