27 June 2008

Society for Scientific Values website on Atiyah-Raju case

Subject: SSV website on Atiyah-Raju case
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:39:14+0000

The Society for Scientific Values has now placed the following on its website http://www.scientificvalues.org/cases.html.

2007 case, number 2. Atiyah-Raju Case:

Prof C.K. Raju charged Prof Michel Atiyah, former President of the Royal Society, UK, of plagiarizing or claiming inappropriate credit to some of his previously published ideas. After ascertaining from 3 independent experts that the complaint is valid, SSV contacted Dr. Atiyah for his views. Atiyah wrote to SSV that while he has not published anything on the subject under question, he has indeed lectured on the subject without being aware of Raju's publications. Now that he is aware of them, he assured that he would certainly cite them if and when he publishes something on the subject. In the light of the responses from Dr. Atiyah and the counter-response of Dr. Raju, establishing a prima-facie case, it was decided to place the response of both sides on the SSV website.


Almost a year AFTER Atiyah was directly informed of my 1994 book Time: Towards a Consistent Theory (Kluwer Academic), and subsequent publications, a prominent article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, June 2006 AGAIN gave credit to Atiyah again without mentioning my work. The reference to my work would have made that article unpublishable. The references were given almost a year later. And see how hard it is to spot them in this link to Walker's letter of 2007.http://www.ams.org/notices/200704/commentary-web.pdf

My letter "Is this Ethical?" pointing out the curious "second oversight" was not published. (See this letter at http://11PicsofTime.com/IsThisEthical.pdf .)

A petition against this "celebrity justice" signed, among others, by several prominent Indian academicians was not even acknowledged by the American Mathematical Society. That shows the real ethics of the AMS: not what it preaches, but what it practices.Further details are now also on site (http://ckraju.net/atiyah/atiyahcase.html under construction).

22 June 2008

Aryabhata and Ptolemy

How does Aryabhata's value of pi compare with Ptolemy's?


Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:12:36 +0500
Subject: Re: Aryabhata and Ptolemy

Dear Mr Smith,

Thank you for your interest in my article on Aryabhata.

Geometrical techniques for computing pi were used in India since the sulba sutra (-500 CE). In my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics (more details at http://indiancalculus.info/ ) I argued that Aryabhata discarded geometrical techniques and shifted to an elegant numerical technique to compute pi. This is essentially the same as what is today known as Euler's method for solving ordinary differential equations. This technique was later used by the 14th c. Madhava to derive the value of pi accurately to ten decimal places. Using a continued fraction expansion gave 355/113 etc. as successive convergents, which were explicitly obtained.

In the same book I have also argued that the Almagest is an accretive text for which no unique author can be identified, and there is no evidence for any actual person by name Claudius Ptolemy. The knowledge contained in the available versions of the Almagest from after 9th c. is not reflected in the calendar reforms of the 4th through 6th centuries.

With good wishes,

C. K. Raju