Geometer ! - kolangal - Baudhayana sutra and more !!

Do you know who or what  is a ‘Geometer’ ?? 

There are some wonder women of Triplicane who religiously draw big kolams for Perumal – many  in front of their homes and some in front of Temple and mantaps where Emperuman visits !! 

Some look like joined tri-angles, some are overlapping circles, some are joining the dots and lines – they are but complex and is by no means an easy job – all that is done for welcoming Emperuman in His purappadu.  

The Baudhāyana sūtras are a group of Vedic Sanskrit texts which cover dharma, daily ritual, mathematics and is one of the oldest Dharma-related texts of Hinduism that have survived into the modern age from the 1st-millennium BCE. They belong to the Taittiriya branch of the Krishna Yajurveda school and are among the earliest texts of the genre.  

There is one branch of mathematics that deals with shapes, angles, dimensions and sizes of a variety of things we see in everyday life – “Geometry”,  derived from Ancient Greek words – ‘Geo’ meaning ‘Earth’ and ‘metron’ meaning ‘measurement’. In Euclidean geometry, there are two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional shapes.  

Euclid  was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the Elements treatise, which established the foundations of geometry that largely dominated the field until the early 19th century. His system, now referred to as Euclidean geometry, involved new innovations in combination with a synthesis of theories from earlier Greek mathematicians, including Eudoxus of Cnidus, Hippocrates of Chios, Thales and Theaetetus. With Archimedes and Apollonius of Perga, Euclid is generally considered among the greatest mathematicians of antiquity, and one of the most influential in the history of mathematics. 

The most common types of geometry are plane geometry (dealing with objects like the point, line, circle, triangle, and polygon), solid geometry (dealing with objects like the line, sphere, and polyhedron), and spherical geometry (dealing with objects like the spherical triangle and spherical polygon).

 

Obvious that there are more difficult challenges in drawing kolam – ask these women of Thiruvallikkeni

 
adiyen dhasan
Mamandur Veeravalli Srinivasan Sampathkumar
3.3.2023