Recently, I watched a video in which the author claims that there is a sloka in praise of Lord Krishna which results in the value of "pi" up to 30 decimal places, in the katapayadi system. Here is the sloka:
gopi bhagya madhuvrata
srngiso dadhi sandhiga
khala jivita khatava
gala hala rasandara
Is this true?
It looks this shloka originates from Bharati Krishna Tirthaji's system of so-called "Vedic Mathematics". Note that despite its name, it's widely agreed that Tirthaji's system isn't actually Vedic in origin; Tirthaji claimed that his 16 Sutras were from the Parishishta of the Atharvana Veda, but they're not actually found there. (Here's a good paper discussing the provenance of Tirthaji's Vedic Mathematics system. For the real mathematics of the Vedic period see here.) And the supposed shloka in question isn't even a correct Katapayadi translation of pi; here is what this book says:
Now we know enough about the authentic Katapayadi system to identify the origin of the Guru [Tirthaji]'s verse... According to the guru [Tirthaji], decoding the verse produces the following number:
31415 92653 58969 32384 62643 38327 92
In this number we recognize the first 31 decimals of pi... In the authentic Katapayadi system, the decimals are encoded in reverse order. So according to the authentic system, the verse is decoded as
29723 83346 26483 23979 85356 29514 13.
We conclude that the verse is not medieval, and certainly not Vedic. In all likelihood, the guru [Tirthaji] is the author of the verse
Actually the approximate value of pi was known in the Shulba Sutras in ancient India (not in the Vedas per se). Obviously knowing it to 32 places of decimal is impossible without the usage of modern numerical methods applied to analytical expressions unknown at the time.
See here: http://books.google.co.za/books?id=MMMPBwAAQBAJ page 185
The motivations for estimating pi in the Shulba Sutras was the construction of circular fire altars (which will obviously require at least a rough estimate of the ratio of the circumference to the diameter). They certainly determined that the ratio was universal, though estimating it to any degree of accuracy beyond 3.1416 was highly unlikely.
Contrary to the claims made by some of the posters, there was little transmigration to India from the Middle East between the Vedic period and the common era, so knowledge transmission from "older" (not really) Semitic societies is highly unlikely. Claims of middle eastern transmigrations were made by British scholars in the 19th century and have largely been discredited outside Britain.
I should qualify this remark by saying that I'm excluding those periods and/or parts of the middle east that were under Hittite, Indo-Greek, Selucid, Graeco-Bactrian or Achemeneid-Persian control during the period in question, and I'm excluding Afghanistan and Iran from my definition of the "middle east", since those societies were predominantly Indo-European like Northern and Central India.
कटपयादि Number System (Coalescence of Literature and Science in Ancient India)
It is a numerical technique accredited in ancient India to depict letters to numerals for easy remembrance of numbers as words or verses.
Mechanism of this system-
Now the time appears to see the mathematical wisdom of ancient Indians in the twist of extraordinary poetry.
a) Sankara Varman once wrote a verse in the 4th chapter of his book Sadratnamala-
भद्राम्बुधिसिद्धजन्मगणितश्रद्धा स्म यद् भूपगी:
Splitting the consonants in the relevant phrase gives,
Reversing the digits to modern-day usage of descending order of decimal places, we get 314159265358979324 which is the value of π to 17 decimal places, except the last digit, which might be rounded off to 4.
b) Jagadguru Shankaracharya Swami Bharati Krishna Tirtha wrote a sloka, which is literally in seance the praise for Lord Krishna-
गोपीभाग्य मधुव्रात:
शृङ्गिशोदधि सन्धिग।
खलजीवितखाताव
गलहाला रसंधर॥
("O Lord anointed with the yoghurts of the milkmaids' worship, O savior of the fallen, O master of Shiva, please protect me")
If you want to decode this verse in terms of the Katapayadi system, you can get, 31415926535897932384626433832792. It means this verse encrypts the exact value of π up to 31 decimal places.
c) Let us now talk about कटपयादि संख्या method how ancient Indians encoded the value of one more famous irrational number 'e' (2.7182818....) into the following verse-
रथ यह राजा का है।
After deciphering this verse into number we get 27182818, which is the exact value of e upto 7 decimal points.
In this note, take a deep breath and think about this once more. In ancient times Indians were able to determine the exact value of irrational number π up to 31 decimal places and encrypted them into such a great sloka. Just try to imagine their mathematical wisdom and literary efficiency.
--
Certainly yes.
Some people in this trail are saying that it is not vedic.
But let me tell you that the shloka was written in Dwapara yuga. That is very old.
Also, according to standard Katpayadi series, it gives value of Pi in reverse order, so it is definitely an encrypted message by rishi Veda Vyasa which is something very deep.
Also I feel very bad that Indians are only saying that it is not Vedic or Medieval.
One thing we must think that if in Rig-veda, our Rishis mentioned speed of light very accurately, then is it possible to think that they don't know value of pi about 31 places.!!
You can check this post regarding speed of light.
I ran into a reference to this question and its 5 answers by accident.
I have two comments about this:
I even tried to see if there was a typo and some change would change last 2 to 5. I don't see any change of words which will do this change!
Swamiji also claims that this verse gives the first 32 digits and also a "key" to generate as many more as needed.
Of course, swamiji gives no hint of what the key is! Indeed he would have accomplished a lot more by providing the key - with a proof as well. It would have been one of the greatest achivement of the century!
One of the answers states that "But let me tell you that the shloka was written in Dwapara yuga". This is, of course, in the style of swamiji himself. There is not even a hint to the source - not even a guess!
My reason for running into this topic was to find out an oldest use of this system of numbers (or even the भूतसंख्या system).
I request to anyone who might know such a use, with reference, of course! Thank you.
Avinash
