An Appraisal of the Greek and Indian Approaches in Determining the Surface Area of a Sphere
Authors
-
,IN
K. Mahesh -
,INAditya Kolachana
-
,INK. Ramasubramanian
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18311/jims/2018/18897Keywords:
Archimedes, Bhāskara, Pedagogy, Sphere, Surface area, Volume.Abstract
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 SiddhāntaÅ›iromaṇi (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.
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Copyright (c) 2018 K. Mahesh, Aditya Kolachana, K. Ramasubramanian
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Accepted 2018-01-02
Published 2018-01-04
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