IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

While both the Greek and Indian civilisations have made immense contributions to the development of mathematics, their approaches to various problems widely differ, both in terms of the techniques employed by them and in their scope. We demonstrate this in the context of determining the surface area of a sphere. While the solution to this problem is attributed to Archimedes (3rd cent. bce) in the Greek tradition, the first surviving proof in the Indian tradition can be found in Bhāskara's Siddhāntaśiromani (12th cent. CE). In this paper, we discuss the approaches taken by Archimedes and Bhāskara and compare their techniques from a mathematical as well as a pedagogical standpoint. © 2018 Indian Mathematical Society.

World University root node

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society

An appraisal of the Greek and Indian approaches in determining the surface area of a sphere

A set of tables devoted to the sun and the moon, titled the Candrārkī (“Related to the moon and sun”), was compiled in Sanskrit by Indian astronomer Dinakara along with a short accompanying text, intended to give guidance on how to construct a calendar (pañcāṅga) for any desired year and geographical circumstances. The epoch of this table-text is 9 April 1578. We present here an edition of the text, a literal translation, and detailed technical commentary. © The Author(s) 2018.