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Calculus before Newton, in Kerala

From India·An enduring case

Mathematicians of the Kerala school, beginning with Madhava in the fourteenth century, derived infinite series for pi and trigonometric functions centuries before similar results appeared in Europe. Standard histories of calculus long omitted them. What a discipline knows about its own past depends on whose archives get read.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

TruthStatus of Knowledge
The property a claim has when things are as it says they are. Whether truth is correspondence to a world, coherence within a system, or what enquiry would settle on in the long run is itself contested, and different areas of knowledge lean on different answers.
PerspectiveThe Knower's Lens
The position from which a knower encounters something, made up of their history, training, interests and situation. A perspective is not only a limitation: it can make features of a problem visible that no view from nowhere would pick up.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Perspectives
Whose viewpoints have shaped this knowledge, which viewpoints have been absent, and how the discipline handles internal disagreement. This element includes the historical dimension: how the standpoint of a field has moved over time.

Areas of knowledge

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.