Lately, I've been trying to help myself gain admission to a good management programme. In pursuit of that end, I enrolled up for a maths help class, to help me with my deplorably poor comprehension of math. Thats where I bumped into a technique used by my ancestors(well, they are!~:), vedic maths. Having just heard about it till then, I did never think that, it held so much of promise for lost romantics of MATH. I just had believed that, I was not as smart as those others who did better than me, and never loved huge multiplications, or division, or any other arithmetic operation involving huge numbers, it was totally incomprehensible for me. All that I'd cared to know about Vedic Maths, had been from a news paper article long back that described how the value of 'Pi' had been encoded in a sanskrit text to a very accurate degree of places of digits.

The teacher who came in to teach me 'Foundation in Quantitative Techniques', was a very simple, tall, slim & loving lady. And she's pregnant with he first child, and it show all the way out. It always brought a smile on my face whenever, she came in. But, what I hadn't realized was that I would be laughing, on my way out of class; laughing at what a fool I've been for thinking math was beyond me. She never mentioned, that this was going to be based on Vedic Maths, as the title of the class seems to describe, I just expected her to teach me how to add, subtract, multiply and divide(backto school;-).

The first calculation she asked us to do was to find the square of 41. God! where've I come too, I seem to have come to a refresher session for GEEKS. I was totally lost and tried looking busy. After around 5 secs, she said times up. She asked around for the answer, there was not a soul among the 20-odd strong class of 20 somethings who spoke a word, let alone spit out the number. So she helped us with the answer, 1681. Looking at the bewildered faces strewn across th class, she set out to explain how its done- the Vedic way.

For squares of numbers, when the number is pretty close to 50, esp. numbers greater than 30 and less than 75. She asked us what the square of 25 was? There was a obvious quickfire fo the answer, 2500. She said we could use the square of 50 to find out the sqaure of these numbers. The process, though a little elaborate while explaining, is quite simple in practice. Take the difference of the number to 50, and add it to '25', the numbers at the 1000's place & the 100's place of the square of 50 ie 2500. That gives us, here while squaring 41 ==> 25+(-9)=16. Now take the square of the difference(9) and write it in the 1's place and 10's place ie sqaure of 9, 81. So that gives you the answer, 41*41=1681.

(41)² = ?

(50)² = 2500

41-50 = -9

25+(-9) = 16

(9)²= 81

So VEDIC maths tell you, (41)² =1681

Check out the answer on a calculator or on a piece of paper... ;-) just to be sure.

So what happens when we want to find out the sqaure of 36.

(36)²= ?

(50)² = 2500

36-50=-14

25+(-14)=11

(14)²⁼ 196 :-O

Ohoh, but you only have two places for three digit's....

so here's wat you do....

Since, 11 is in the 1000^th and 100^th place, the number would start with 1&1 :-)

1100+

  196

1296

Simple ain't it. Lets see what happens when to numbers greater than 50.

(62)² = ?

(50)² = 2500

62-50=12

(12)² =144

25+12=37

3700+

  144

3844

Well, after a little bit of practice, was going full steam and had shed a bit of the lead, and was floating back up from the ocean floor.

Lets go a little bit higher, 100 and above.....

At First: 100-110

Lets look at the square of 101. As a first step write down 1 at the starting of the answer. Before that... for numbers above 100, we need at first, to have a idea about how many digits thenumber would be.... (100)² = 10000, (200)² = 40000. So, at least among numbers from 100-200, there are 5-digits.

So,

(101)² = ?????

After first Step,

(101)² =1????

Second step, take the double of the last two digits, ie 2*1=02

(101)² =102??

Third Step, take the square of the last digit, 1 , ie (1)² =01

(101)² =10201

Now let go over to greater hieghts: 100 – 199

Keep watching this space.... gotto find more time to complete .... ciao for now, but I promise I'd come back to illustrate more...

Ancient Sanskrit scholars "hid" many things behind normal
shlokas. One key to uncover the hidden meaning goes like:

kaadinava Taadinava paadipanchakam
yaadyashhtakah kshha shunyam

According to this "key", the swaras are given values as (the sequence of Sanskrit alphabets):

k kha ga gha cha chhha ja jha jyan
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Ta Tha Da Dha Na ta tha da dha
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

pa pha ba bha ma
1 2 3 4 5

ya ra la va sha shha sa ha
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Vowels, gya and kshha have a value of zero.

Now, apply this key to the following shloka:

gopibhaagyamadhuvraata
shringishodadhisandhiga
khalaajeevitakhaataava
galahaataarasandhara

What one obtains is the value of p/ 10 correct to 31 places after the decimal point !
3.1415926 53589793 23846264 3383279

GYAN COURTESY~~ http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/UNC/