The Venerable Zero

Ancient India was a powerhouse of new concepts in mathematics and astronomy, asserts William Dalrymple’s new book, The Golden Road. India stood out most dramatically in scientific rather than spiritual ideas. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, wrote in his classic Discovery of India: “It is remarkable that the Indians, though apparently detached from life, were yet intensely curious about it, and this curiosity led them to science.” Why does the present prime minister of the country choose to highlight the religious contributions? Well, you know the answer.

While reading Dalrymple yesterday, I was reminded of a math prof I had for my graduation course. Baby was his first name and I can’t recall the surname. ‘Baby’ was a common name for men in Kerala of the mid-twentieth century. The present General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is a 71-year-old Baby from Kerala.

Our Prof Baby was a middle-aged man who knew a lot more than mathematics. One day he delivered the keynote address of a seminar organised by the math department and impressed all of us with his views on zero and infinity, ancient India’s revolutionary contributions to math. But North India doesn’t seem to appreciate this contribution, he said, and I still remember it. “They call zero shunya, nothingness. We Malayalis call it pujyam, the venerable.”

Without zero, math couldn’t have progressed much. Far from being shunya, our sampujya (venerable) zero is everything for arithmetic. Without zero, our math would still be stuck in the stone age, counting sheep with pebbles. How would you distinguish 15 from 105 and 1005 without zero? How would you perform simple arithmetic operations like multiplication and division without zero? Imagine the ancient Roman, with all his great civilisation to assist, trying to divide LXXVIII by IX.

Algebra without zero is like Hamlet without the prince. Well, I don’t remember if Prof Baby brought the Prince of Denmark to our alma mater, St Albert’s college in Kochi. But I do remember quite much of his speech.

All those intriguing quadratic equations wouldn’t even exist without zero. And don’t even talk about limits and derivatives in calculus, which was Prof Baby’s pet paper, if I remember correctly. Without zero, my dear reader, Newton and Leibniz (developer of calculus) would have probably gone gardening or plucking apples.

And, Prof Baby went on: Infinity would just be impossible without zero. Infinity is both a mathematical and a philosophical leap from zero, a giant leap over all the possible and imaginary numbers. And who discovered infinity? Prof Baby paused dramatically. I can still feel those bated breaths of young mathematicians of the 1982-85 batch in a nondescript classroom of a college. “India did,” Prof Baby said passionately. Fervently.

Om purnamadah purnamidam

purnat purnamudachyate,

purnasya purnamadaya

purnamevavashishyate.

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti.

I couldn’t believe my ears. A mathematics prof who was Christian by faith was reciting a Vedic shloka to a heterogeneous group of undergrads who were trying to figure out the difference between differentiation and integration in elementary calculus.

There is infinity everywhere, Prof Baby went on to explain the sholka. Here, there, everywhere. Take away infinity from infinity, and infinity remains. If you add infinity to infinity, again infinity will remain. See, Prof Baby underscored, how mathematics meets philosophy and mysticism. “You are learning a divine subject,” he said with palpable pride.

I didn’t pursue math beyond graduation because I fell in love with Dostoevsky and Kazantzakis in the meanwhile. But Prof Baby remains in my memory as fresh as on that day of his unforgettable lecture on the venerability of zero.

Today, when I listen to people like my prime minister, I remember people like Prof Baby who knew how to blend various streams and religions and subjects and make us love them all. I am left with a deep longing for such people.