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CHAPTER-12
JAIN MATHEMATICS
Introduction
Mathematics means a way of expressing certain kind of thoughts in the form of numbers, quantities, shapes etc. Mathematics represents the abstraction of all the basic sciences. Through history, the statutes of any given science at a given time could probably evaluate by the extent to which the science was mathematicised.
Ancient India contributed tremendously to the development of mathematics. The oldest evidence of mathematical knowledge to Indians is found in the Indus valley civilization. Archaeological discoveries have found evidence of meticulous town planning at Mohenjedaro and Harrapa. It is clear that the cities of this civilization could not have been built without knowledge of geometry. During Vedic period, the sacrificial altars were constructed in various safe geometrical shapes to confine the sacred fire. The Sulbasutras give us several geometrical rules and procedures for the construction of fire-altars. The shapes of pits used to be in geometrical segments, e.g. triangle, quadrilateral, oval, spherical, circular etc. and the other geometrical shapes were the falcon-shaped, rhombus, wheel with and without spokes, square, tortoise-shaped and so on. There is no doubt that in ancient India the excellence in mathematics existed to an extent that they used a system of measures and weights based on an awareness of the decimal system.
Narration In the western world Galileo declared that nature could be read only through mathematics. Pythagoras believed that the entire universe could be understood in terms of natural numbers and their ratios. According to them, the moving planets demonstrated the divine nature of the natural numbers by the play of "the music of spheres." The knowledge of the relationship between the ratios of natural numbers and the musical scale emboldened them to establish a belief system wherein they held the natural numbers themselves to be God. There is something surely natural to numbers that prompted people like Leopold Kronecker to announce, "God made the natural numbers, all else is the work of man." Though insentient, numbers perform important functions in our lives. Numbers do not have a physical entity of their own. They are just an abstraction.
In the field of Geometry, Pythagoras was the first to prove the theorem that says the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides of a right angle triangle is equal to the
