1859 CE and beyond: Some reflections
The yuga between 1800 CE and 1900 CE saw a remarkable change in our understanding of the world at many levels. It is not that some of these ideas did not exist long before that time but they came...
View ArticleA novel discrete map exhibiting chaotic behavior
The map proposed by R. Lozi over 40 years ago is one of the simplest two dimensional maps that exhibits chaotic behavior and generates a wide range of interesting structures. The map may be defined...
View ArticleNewton’s cows
Cultures with an Indo-European background have had a long history of symbiosis with the bovine animal since they started herding on the steppes in the Black Sea-Caspian region. Indeed, the very...
View ArticleA dinnertime conversation
A complete version of this apolog will currently not be visible to the public. Things had cooled off a bit on the political front after the assassination of the Prime Minister Pratap Simha by a massed...
View ArticleAn apparition of Mordell
Consider the equation: where is a positive integer 1, 2, 3… For a given , will the above equation have integer solutions and, if yes, what are they and how many? We have heard of accounts of people...
View ArticleCreating patterns through matrix expansion
People who are seriously interested in emergent complexity and pattern formation might at some point discover matrix expansion for themselves. It is a version of string rewriting that allows one to...
View ArticleLiṅga-kāmādi-sūtrāṇi
Devanagari PDF version .. Sūtrapāṭhaḥ .. atha liṅga-kāmādi-sūtrāṇi vyākhyāsyāmaḥ . jīvasūtrāṇunām anukrameṣu parimeyā vikārā jīvā-paramparāyā+avaśyam . jantvoḥ saṃgrāmas tasya paramaṃ kāraṇam . tasmād...
View ArticleNotes on the Bhadra-sūkta, a hymn for felicity to the Vedic pantheon
For better type-setting and Devanagari rendering use PDF version. Introduction Several sub-schools of the Taittirīya school of the Kṛṣṇayajurveda possess their own collections of mantra-s distinct from...
View ArticleMongolica: The Tangut empire
In the early 1100s of the CE Rtsa-mi lotsawa Sangs-rgyas grags-pa was in Nālandā, India, to study and transmit the latest that the tāntrika strain of Bauddha-mata had to offer. Within a century both...
View ArticleLeaves from the scrapbook-3
As described here these entries are from the scrapbook of Somakhya. Entry 3; Nimlukti, year Anala of the first cycle: I was still at Turushkarajapura at a lab where I had access to a computer-network...
View ArticleFraudulent science by Indians: some really bad news
Around 2011 we were approached by a researcher of Indian origin for a collaboration in biochemistry regarding a family of proteins whose biochemical functions we had uncovered. After more than an year...
View ArticleCows, horses, sheep and goats
It goes without saying that humans are what they are today because of cows, horses, sheep and goats. Hindu civilization in particular is in the very least the product for the first two, while remaining...
View ArticlePacking constants for polygonal fractal maps
Among the very first programs which we wrote in our childhood was one to generate the famous Sierpinski triangle as an attractor using the “Chaos Game” algorithm of Barnsley. A couple of years later we...
View ArticleŚiva-gaṇa-s and Andhakāsura-vadha in the Vāmana-purāṇa
On Twitter, one of our acquaintances going by the name @GhorAngirasa had a discussion on the significance of the number 66 in śaiva tradition. That reminded us of an unfinished article where we had...
View ArticleFrom Plato to Euler and back
This is primarily meant as an educational handout on some very basic theorems of geometry that one might have studied in school. Some educated adults whom we asked about these had either forgotten them...
View ArticleLeaves from the scrapbook-4
As described here these entries are from the scrapbook of the second of the caturbhaginī, Vrishchika. Entry 1; kāmāturā, year Siddhārthin of the first cycle: Indrasena departed for grad school last...
View ArticleThe Platonic culmination of Euclid and the pentagon-hexagon-decagon identity
Why did great sage Pāṇini compose the Aṣṭādhyāyī? There were probably multiple reasons but often you hear people say that he wanted to give a complete description of the Sanskrit language. That was...
View ArticleMatters of religion: the Vāyavīyaṃ Kaubera-vratam
The bus came to halt at the underground stop. Vrishchika of pretty tresses got off the bus and walked up the stairs to reach the over-bridge. She reached the middle of the bridge and stood there...
View ArticleDiscovering bronze in the characteristic ellipse of right triangles
The arithmetic mean square of a right triangle An entire family of right triangles that includes all the different forms of right triangles defined in terms of the proportion of their legs can be...
View ArticleNārāyaṇa’s sequence, Mādhava’s series and pi
The coin-toss problem and Nārāyaṇa’s sequence If you toss a fair coin times how many of the possible result-sequences of tosses will not have a successive run of 3 or more Heads? The same can be...
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