Prakash Per­sad

The lan­guage of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy is math­e­mat­ics. Just like in every­day life, if we are un­able to com­mu­ni­cate our thoughts and ideas to oth­ers, they can be nei­ther un­der­stood nor de­vel­oped; sim­i­lar­ly for sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. So math­e­mat­ics is es­sen­tial for the growth and de­vel­op­ment of S&T and ar­guably, the tip­ping point in its evo­lu­tion was the ac­cep­tance of the num­ber ze­ro.

It is rather iron­ic that the west­ern world, which rose to pre-em­i­nence on the strength of its progress in S&T, ini­tial­ly re­fused to ac­cept the con­cept of ze­ro, which was put for­ward by an­cient In­di­an math­e­mati­cians.

But sci­en­tists and math­e­mati­cians are al­so hu­man and there­fore may dis­play hos­til­i­ty and re­cal­ci­trance to new ideas that run counter to their re­li­gious and so­cial/his­tor­i­cal norms. In fact, the nu­mer­al sys­tem used as a stan­dard world­wide is based on the one de­vel­oped by the In­di­ans, in­clud­ing the sym­bols for the num­bers. The Arabs adopt­ed it and trans­mit­ted it to the Eu­ro­peans.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers