The Indian mind has always had for calculations and the handling of numbers an extraordinary inclination, ease and power, such as no other civilization in history ever possessed to the same degree. So much so that Indian culture regarded the science of numbers as the noblest of its arts ... A thousand years ahead of Europeans, Indian savants knew that the zero and infinity were mutually inverse notions.

It is clear how much we owe to this brilliant civilization, and not only in the field of arithmetic; by opening the way to the generalization of the concept of the number, the Indian scholars enabled the rapid development of mathematics and exact sciences. The discoveries of these men doubtless required much time and imagination, and above all a great ability for abstract thinking. These major discoveries took place within an environment which was at once mystical, philosophical, religious, cosmological, mythological and metaphysical."

Science was woven into philosophical thought - The study and cultivation of exact sciences in India was a part of search for truth and reality. From Vedic times onwards, investigations into the realm of the spiritual included those of the physical. The whole of the philosophical literature is replete with and based on some of the tenets of science as we understand it today. It has been an unmitigated calamity for India that it were the philologists, both eastern and western, who became the first interpreters to her ancient Sanskrit literature. India's Sanskrit literature came to be interpreted in an apologetic tone and from the standpoint of the western achievements. Some of the sublimities of the Hindu thought, far ahead of the prevailing times, were considered as oddities belonging to primitive past. The great Orientalists were philologists, not philosophers.
India was called the Bharat Varsha, the "country that embraces all in one bond," and she was selected to become the embodiment of that immutable, eternal, law of the universe, Santana Dharma - dharma is that which "holds together" - which makes the universes run in their orbits. It was this principle of dharma, synthesis, balance, harmonious relationship between various forces and factors, between various individuals and groups, that came to be the corner-stone of her civilization." "India has been known as the moksha-bhumi and karma-bhoomi, the Land of Liberty, spiritual and temporal, gained through service of fellowmen. India was not thought of as a bhoga-bhumi, a pleasure-resort for a single life-time allowed to the mortals. India is the only country in the world where civilization has revolved round this fundamental spiritual nucleus, where the greatest concentration of intellect has centered round the basic human problem of existence...
In India, religion became scientific and philosophical; science received religious sanction and philosophic support, and philosophy became religious, with a practical bearing on the problems of daily life. Here lies the secret of India's uniqueness and greatness. India saw Reality as a whole; there was no partition walls in the world of the One. With this universality, humanity and sublime idealism India offered a challenge to time.

In India, an aptitude for the study of numbers and arithmetical research was often combined with a surprising tendency towards metaphysical abstractions; in fact, the latter is so deeply ingrained in Indian thought and tradition that one meets it in all fields of study, from the most advanced mathematical ideas to disciplines completely unrelated to 'exact sciences."

We believe that the idea underlying this integral concept of statistics finds adequate expression in the ancient Indian work Sankhya in |Sanskrit the usual meaning is ‘number‘, but the original root meaning was ‘determinate knowledge’ in the Atharva Veda a derivative from Sankhyata occurs both in the sense of ‘well-known‘ as well as ‘numbered’. The lexicons give both meanings. Amarakosa gives Sankhya – vicarana (deliberation, analysis) as well as ‘number’; also Sankhyavan – panditah (wise, learned).

We catch a glimpse of the great river of science which never ceases to flow in India. For India has carried and scattered the data of intellectual progress for the whole world, ever since the pre-Buddhist period when she produced the Sankhya philosophy and the atomic theory; the fifth century, when her mathematics and astronomy find their blossom in Arya Bhatta; the seventh when Brahmagupta uses his highly-developed Algebra and makes astronomical observations; the twelfth, brilliant with the glory of Bhaskaracharya, and his famous daughter, down to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries themselves with Ram Chandra the mathematician and Jagdish Chandra Bose the physicist."

Indian culture in all probability excelled in systematic thought about Nature (as for example in the Sarokhya atomic theories of Kshana, bhutadim paramanu, etc.), including also biological speculations ... When the balance comes to be made up, it will be found I believe, that Indian scientific history holds as many brilliant surprises ...

The Indian people were the only civilization to take the decisive step towards the perfection of numerical notation. We owe the discovery of modern numeration and the elaboration of the very foundations of written calculations to India alone."

One who was well versed in that science was called in ancient India as samkhyajna (the expert of numbers), parimanajna (the expert in measuring), sama-sutra-niranchaka (Uinform-rope-stretcher), Shulba-vid (the expert in Shulba) and Shulba-pariprcchaka (the inquirer into the Shulba). Of these term, viz, 'sama-sutra-niranchaka' perhaps deserves more particular notice. For we find an almost identical term, 'harpedonaptae' (rope-stretcher) appearing in the writings of the Greek Democritos (c. 440 BC). It seems to be an instance of Hindu influence on Greek geometry. For the idea in that Greek term is neither of the Greeks nor of their acknowledged teachers in the science of geometry, the Egyptians, but it is characteristically of Hindu origin." The English word 'Geometry' has a Greek root which itself is derived from the Sanskrit word 'Jyamiti'. In Sanskrit 'Jya' means an arc or curve and 'Miti' means correct perception or measurement.

Number was born in superstition and reared in mystery,... numbers were once made the foundation of religion and philosophy, and the tricks of figures have had a marvellous effect on a credulous people.

The association between religion and mathematically based science has its origins in the mists of history. ...the very dawn of Western culture in sixth-century B.C. Greece. ...[W]hen the Greeks were turning away from the mythological picture immortalized by Homer and Hesiod, the Ionian philosopher Pythagoras of Samos pioneered a worldview in which mathematics was seen as the key to reality. In place of the mythological gods, Pythagoras painted a picture in which the universe was conceived as a great musical instrument resonating with divine mathematical harmonies. ...[inspiring] mystics, theologians, and physicists ever since. ...But to Pythagoras and his followers, mathematics was the key not simply to the physical world, but more importantly to the spiritual world—for they believed that numbers were literally gods. By contemplating numbers and their relationships, the Pythagoreans sought union with the "divine." For them, mathematics was first and foremost a religious activity.

I shall now speak of the knowledge of the Hindus ... of their subtle discoveries even more ingenious than those of the Greeks and Babylonians - of their rational system of matbematics or of their method of calculation which no word can praise strongly enough - 1 mean the system using the nine symbols. If these things were known by the people who think that they alone have mastered the sciences because they speak Greek, they would perhaps be convinced that every folk, not only Greeks, but men of a different tongues, know something as well as they.

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit.But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

Anachronistic as this labyrinthine mythology may appear to the foreign mind, many of India's ancient theories about the universe are startlingly modem in scope and worthy of a people who are credited with the invention of the zero, as well as algebra and its application of astronomy and geometry; a people who so carefully observed the heavens that, in the opinion of Monier- Williams, they determined the moon's synodical revolution much more correctly than the Greeks." This notion of the sleeping and waking, or contracting and expanding, of the Life Force, so long a part of Hindu cosmology, has recently been expressed in relevant terms in an article written for a British scientific journal by Professor Fred Hoyle, Britain's foremost astronomer. " "Plainly, contemporary Western science's description of an astronomical universe of such vast magnitude that distances must be measured in terms as abstract as light-years is not new to Hinduism whose wise men, millennia ago, came up with the term kalpa to signify the inconceivable duration of the period elapsing between the beginning and end of a world system." "It is clear that Indian religious cosmology is sharply at variance with that inherited by Western peoples from the Semites. On the highest level, when stripped of mythological embroidery, Hinduism's conceptions of space, time and multiple universes approximate in range and abstraction the most advanced scientific thought."
"Hinduism created such arresting icons as the divine two-in-one embrace of Shiva and Shakti; or Shiva alone, half male, half female, or the two-sided figure of Hari-Hara, an expression of the seemingly "opposite" creative-destructive forces of Vishnu and Shiva embodied in one being