It’s a Math Math Math World with Divakaran and Shraddha

“If I make a paper plane using a piece of paper, and then unfold it, you will be able to fold it exactly as I did because there is a memory of folding left in that piece of paper,” says Prof. Divakaran. But, complains Shraddha, this does not apply to Kanjeevaram sarees! Where she’s going, Shraddha won’t need a saree. A kimono will do just fine. Our friendly mathematics professor and his eager student journey to Japan in their quest to unravel numbers. Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, is

Ed Sheeran would have been very much at home among the ancient Greeks. Because they, too, were in love with the shape of…everything, actually. Shape. And area and volume. And angles. The ancient Greeks were on a quest for precise measurement and perfect shapes. If their architecture is anything to go by, they knew a thing or three about proportion. Using simple tools they measured to precision and constructed to perfection. What’s this got to do with math? For the Greeks, numbers were not abstract

Remember that dreaded figure your teacher scrawled on the margin of your math test paper? It’s the hero of this episode. Our much-villainised zero has a fascinating history. The Babylonians, as we discovered in Episode 1 (Babylon), may have arrived at a placeholder for zero, but the actual symbol did not enter convention until the 7th century in the Indian subcontinent. It later became a foundational element of mathematical concepts during the Islamic Golden Age (the word algebra has Arabic roots)

Babylon, as the story goes, is where applied mathematics took baby steps.“What, really?!” asks Shraddha.Remember the place value system that makes it easy to represent small and large numbers? That originated in Babylon, according to historical records that show that Babylonians had independently discovered the place value system as early as 2000 BCE to 1900 BCE. That’s more than a millennium before other civilisations.Another fun fact: The number 60 played a significant role in Babylonian