
Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel in The Man Who Knew Infinity, a film about the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
For more than three thousand years, mathematics has played an important role in Indian culture. Sometimes it was studied for practical reasons and sometimes for pure intellectual delight. The earliest traces of mathematics are found in the Indus Valley, around 3000 BC. There is clear evidence of a structured system of weights and measures and samples of decimal-based numeration [TM239 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].