Pearl necklaces for Maheśvara
Śrīpati’s pearl necklace for Maheśvara The brāhmaṇa Śrīpati of the Kāśyapa clan was a soothsayer from Rohiṇīkhaṇḍa, which is in the modern Buldhana district of Maharashtra state. Somewhere between 1030...
View ArticleBig fruits and dead giants
The fruits of the elephants nāgo bilvam ivākramya pothayiṣyāmy ahaṃ śiraḥ | alabhyām icchatas tasya kīcakasya durātmanaḥ || Like an elephant seizing a bilva [fruit] I will crush the head of that evil...
View ArticleChaos, eruptions and root-convergence in one-dimensional maps based on...
Over the years we have observed or encountered certain natural phenomena that are characterized by rare, sudden eruptive behavior occurring against a background of very low amplitude fluctuations. We...
View ArticleKaiṭabha, poison and death: meanderings through tradition
For better reading try PDF version The medical Suśruta-saṃhitā, kalpasthāna, chapter 3 contains an unusual mythologem about the origin of poison. It clearly belongs to the Prājāpatya tradition and...
View ArticleA modern glance at Nārāyaṇa-paṇḍita’s combinatorics-1
For improved reading experience one may use the PDF version. Students of the history of Hindu mathematics are well-acquainted with Nārāyaṇa-paṇḍita’s sophisticated treatment of various aspects of...
View ArticleIndo-Iranica: epic ruminations
PDF version of article Prologue We first began our observations on the shared motifs in Indo-Iranian traditions when we were around 8 years of age after our mother introduced us to the Iranian epic,...
View ArticleThe minimal triangle circumscribing a semicircle
Consider a fixed semicircle with center at and radius . Let be the isosceles triangle which circumscribes it (Figure 1). Figure 1 What will be the characteristics of the minimal form of the said...
View ArticleThe blue bottle and the talent show
This story itself is haunted. The deaths Seeing Vidrum intently gaze at something on his phone with an expression of near disbelief Kalakausha asked: “Vidrum, what are you looking at? We need to be...
View ArticleThe aftermath: A polynomial equation
This is merely the tailpiece to the last tale of the strange hauntings. A reader may wonder why expend so many words on a high school problem. While the ball could have fitted into the socket, it...
View ArticleSome (geo)political talk
A political bloviation follows: We must preface this by stating we do not have any affiliation to the party currently ruling India or the RSS and actually have no specific interest at all in electoral...
View ArticleSome notes on rational sector triangle triples
Rational points on a unit circle There are some events that happen in the course of ones life that might be considered historical or world-changing. One such event from our lifetime is the proving of...
View ArticleSome Nārāyaṇa-like convergents and their geometric and trigonometric connections
While playing with an iterative geometric construction in our youth we discovered for ourselves a particular right triangle whose sides are in the proportion , where is the Golden Ratio. This triangle...
View ArticleHuman journeys, ascents and descents
As we headed towards the bus-stand to take our homeward conveyance, we saw an unusual stir in its vicinity. We passed a clump of young, well-to-do, white American women ambling along holding over-sized...
View ArticleSequences related to maps based on simple fractional functions
One of the pleasures of an unstructured youth in the pre-computer era was what we called calculator games. As our father took his prized calculator with him to work we only got a little time with it in...
View ArticleMatters of religion-3
Lootika seeing Somakhya contemplating something remarked: “That great clash of men is upon us, where, as the śruti says, our flag will be mingled with that of the enemy in close combat.” Somakhya:...
View ArticleThe roots of Vaiṣṇavam: a view from the numerology of Vedic texts
While glorified with a 1000 names in the famous stotra of the early Sātvata tradition of the Mahābharata, in the texts of an even earlier period the god primarily went under that name Viṣṇu. Indeed,...
View ArticleThe Aśvin-s and Rudra
The twin Aśvin-s and Rudra are both Indo-Aryan reflexes of two deity-classes which can be reconstructed as likely being present in the Proto-Indo-European religion. Both are likely to have even deeper...
View ArticleThe Mātrā-meru and convergence to a triangle
What is presented below will be elementary for someone with even just the mastery of secondary school mathematics. Nevertheless, even simple stuff might present points of interest to people who see...
View ArticleDifference of consecutive cubes, conics and a Japanese temple tablet
Introduction In our part of the world, someone with even a nominal knowledge of mathematics might be aware of the taxicab number made famous by the conversation of Ramanujan and Hardy: the smallest...
View ArticleTwo squares that sum to a cube
Introduction This note records an exploration that began in our youth with the simple arithmetic question: Sum of the squares of which pair integers yields a perfect cube? Some obvious cases...
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