The Number and the Witness
How an ancient civilization used mathematics to measure the sky — and then to look within
There is an old habit of treating ancient India's sacred texts and its mathematics as two separate stories — myth on one side, science on the other. This essay takes a different view, and tries to earn it honestly. The claim is simple to state: the people who composed the Vedic tradition treated mathematics and metaphysics as a single activity, and they were unusually good at it.
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