Inaugurated on Thursday by External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar, the exhibition will continue till September 14 at the Art Gallery, Kamaladevi Complex.
Centuries before the word "algorithm" became synonymous with Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence, it had its roots in Indian mathematics, carried across continents through manuscripts that crossed borders and languages.
This little-known journey of ideas -- how Sanskrit texts were translated into Farsi and Arabic, then into Latin, shaping global knowledge -- was at the heart of The Mathematical Sciences: South Asia's Contributions, an exhibition that opened this week at the India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi.
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Inaugurated on Thursday by External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar, the exhibition will continue till September 14 at the Art Gallery, Kamaladevi Complex.
It has been curated under SAMHiTA -- South Asian Manuscript Histories and Textual Archive -- an IIC initiative in collaboration with the Centre for Traditional Indian Knowledge Systems and Skills (CTIKS) at IIT Bombay.
At its core, SAMHiTA seeks to create a universally accessible digital repository of manuscripts, many of which lie scattered in collections abroad and remain unsurveyed or difficult to access.
The project inventories works housed in Europe, America, and across South Asia, ensuring that fragile palm-leaf and paper folios are preserved and studied in depth.
This year's exhibition turns the lens specifically on mathematics, where scholars pieced together how foundational concepts such as the decimal and place-value systems, trigonometry, and even the earliest notions of zero emerged in India, and then circulated across Asia.
Through manuscripts and translations -- Sanskrit into Arabic, Arabic into Farsi, and back again -- it highlights the movement of ideas from India to West and Central Asia and their lasting influence on global knowledge traditions.
Among the most striking revelations was the story of the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, who drew on Indian numerals and algorithms in his 9th-century treatise Hisab al-Hind. When his work was later translated into Latin as Algoritmi de numero Indorum, it gave rise to the modern word "algorithm." Today's coding language, in other words, carries the imprint of India's mathematical past.
The exhibition also shed light on the Kerala school of mathematics, where scholars like Madhava and Neelkantha were exploring infinite series and trigonometric functions centuries before similar ideas emerged in Europe.
In fact, manuscripts from this tradition, discovered by East India Company official Charles Wish in the 18th century, contained expansions for pi and sine functions that modern audiences would recognize.
But the project was not just about breakthroughs. It also highlighted how mathematical concepts infused everyday life -- appearing in Sanskrit prosody, temple architecture, music, and even in recipes for perfumes.
One 13th-century musicological text showed how permutations of notes, expressed in verse, mirror what modern mathematicians call factorials.
What binds these threads together, curators said, is the persistence of memory and verse as a medium of teaching. Long before diagrams and formulas, knowledge was encoded in poetic meters, making it easier to memorize and transmit across generations.
By digitizing these fragile manuscripts and making them publicly accessible, SAMHiTA is ensuring that the story of numbers, once etched on palm leaves and birch bark, finds a new life in the digital age. And in that story lies a reminder: some of the most modern ideas we rely on today were first imagined in verse, centuries ago.