A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share beautiful patterns? CMIT is back with a talk, and this time it will take us on a journey of exploring these patterns.
Speaker: Mr. Ganesh Dharmadhikari, IIT Gandhinagar
Title: Decoding the Mysteries of Binary Computations and Musical Harmony in Ancient India
Venue and time: CSB Seminar Hall | 09:00 PM, Tuesday, 11th April, 2023
Abstract: Piṅgala is credited with the first use of the binary system, using light (laghu) and heavy (guru) syllables to describe the combinatorics of the Sanskrit meter. Piṅgala is also sometimes credited with the first use of zero, as he used the Sanskrit word śūnya to explicitly denote a number. Chandaḥ Sutra is also known as Chandaḥśāstra or Piṅgala Sūtra after its author Piṅgala. It is the earliest Hindu treatise on prosody to survive into the modern era. It is a collection of aphorisms focused mainly on the art of poetic meters and presents some mathematics specifically binary systems in music service. We naturally discuss some exciting examples of conversion of binary to decimal and decimal to binary numbers with the help of pratyayas in Piṅgala's Chandaḥśāstra and some poetic examples and naturally move into combinatorial methods in Indian music and later discuss a few ancient Indian examples on combinatorics from Līlavatī and Sangitaratnakarah.
