It’s a Math Math Math World with Divakaran and Shraddha

Dec 01 2023

It’s a Math Math Math World with Divakaran and Shraddha Podcast artwork

Spooked by Mathematics? Well, so was our ‘average student’ Shraddha. Until she met Prof. Divakaran at Azim Premji University, who became her tour guide on a journey into its fascinating history. Voyage with them to Babylon, Greece, Egypt, Japan and, of course, India, to discover the origin stories of numbers. Credits: Akshay Ramuhalli, Bijoy Venugopal, Bruce Lee Mani, Narayan Krishnaswamy, Prashant Vasudevan, Sananda Dasgupta, Seema Seth, Shraddha Gautam, Supriya Joshi, and Velu Shankar.

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Number Origami

Dec 01 2023 29 mins

“If I make a paper plane using a piece of paper, and then unfold it, you will be able to fold it exactly as I did because there is a memory of folding left in that piece of paper,” says Prof. Divakaran. But, complains Shraddha, this does not apply to Kanjeevaram sarees! Where she’s going, Shraddha won’t need a saree. A kimono will do just fine. Our friendly mathematics prof

A Greek Trajectory

Dec 01 2023 33 mins

Ed Sheeran would have been very much at home among the ancient Greeks. Because they, too, were in love with the shape of…everything, actually. Shape. And area and volume. And angles. The ancient Greeks were on a quest for precise measurement and perfect shapes. If their architecture is anything to go by, they knew a thing or three about proportion. Using simple tools they measure

The Zero Story

Dec 01 2023 31 mins

Remember that dreaded figure your teacher scrawled on the margin of your math test paper? It’s the hero of this episode. Our much-villainised zero has a fascinating history. The Babylonians, as we discovered in Episode 1 (Babylon), may have arrived at a placeholder for zero, but the actual symbol did not enter convention until the 7th century in the Indian subcontinent. It later

Babylon

Dec 01 2023 28 mins

Babylon, as the story goes, is where applied mathematics took baby steps.“What, really?!” asks Shraddha.Remember the place value system that makes it easy to represent small and large numbers? That originated in Babylon, according to historical records that show that Babylonians had independently discovered the place value system as early as 2000 BCE to 1900 BCE. That’s more