Place · mathematics school centre · India
Sangamagrama
Also known as Sangamagrama — Madhava tradition
Madhava of Sangamagrama is regarded as the initiating figure of the Kerala school, known for infinite-series results in trigonometry and pi. The exact identification of Sangamagrama has been debated; the locator follows the central Kerala scholarly tradition.
- Date
- 1350–1425
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Condition
- historical scholarly landscape
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — scholarly consensus on school; exact locality debated
- Location
- 10.350, 76.210
Sangamagrama’s exact modern identification is debated; this is an editorial regional locator.
Connections (2)
- Teaching lineageNīlakantha Somayāji
The Kerala school runs from Mādhava about 1400 through Parameshvara, Nīlakantha and Jyeshthadeva to the seventeenth century — a documented teacher-to-student line over ten generations in one small stretch of Malabar. It produced infinite series for the trigonometric functions, a heliocentric model for the inner planets, and proofs; and it stayed almost entirely unknown outside Kerala until the nineteenth century.
- Canonised by textJyeshthadeva
The Yuktibhāshā is written in Malayalam, not Sanskrit, and gives derivations rather than results — which makes it the earliest text anywhere that does mathematics the way a modern textbook does. Whether the Kerala results reached Europe through Jesuit missionaries in Kochi is argued about and unresolved; what is certain is that the work was done, and written down, two centuries before Newton.
On these journeys
Sources
K.V. Sarma, A History of the Kerala School of Hindu Astronomy; modern history-of-mathematics scholarship.
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