Vedic Mathematics

Vedic Mathematics

Author	Bharati Krishna Tirtha
Subject	Mental calculation
Publisher	Motilal Banarsidass
Publication date	1965
Publication place	India
ISBN	978-8120801646
OCLC	217058562

Vedic Mathematics is a book written by Indian Shankaracharya Bharati Krishna Tirtha and first published in 1965. It contains a list of mathematical techniques which were falsely claimed to contain advanced mathematical knowledge.^[1] The book was posthumously published under its deceptive title by editor V. S. Agrawala,^[2] who noted in the foreword that the claim of Vedic origin, made by the original author and implied by the title, was unsupported.^[3]

Neither Krishna Tirtha nor Agrawala were able to produce sources, and scholars unanimously note it to be a compendium of methods for increasing the speed of elementary mathematical calculations sharing no overlap with historical mathematical developments during the Vedic period. Nonetheless, there has been a proliferation of publications in this area and multiple attempts to integrate the subject into mainstream education at the state level by right-wing Hindu nationalist governments.^[4][5]

S. G. Dani of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay wrote that despite the dubious historigraphy, some of the calculation methods it describes are themselves interesting, a product of the author's academic training in mathematics and long recorded habit of experimentation with numbers.^[3]