#Pingala

Piṅgala · c. 3rd–2nd century BCE

In the books · 1 chapter

Who this is

Chandas — prosody, the science of verse metres, one of the six vedāṅgas, the "limbs of the Veda"; the mathematics fell out of the poetics.

“A man cataloguing poetry — light syllable, heavy syllable, every arrangement in order — stumbled into the raw materials of computer science two thousand years before anyone needed a computer, and never once thought he was doing mathematics.”

— The Great Indians, Ch. 37

The big idea, in the book's words:

“Trying merely to list every possible rhythm a Sanskrit line can carry, he built the machinery of binary enumeration — recursive listing, indexing and un-indexing, the counts we call Pascal's triangle and the Fibonacci numbers — and used a written mark called śūnya, "empty," that stands at the head of zero's paper trail.”

— The Great Indians, Ch. 37