India was the richest country on earth until after the coming of the British in the17th century. Christopher Columbus was attracted by her wealth. British, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and other "adventurers" were racing against each other to establish trading privileges in India. It was known as the true land
of milk and honey.
Vasco da Gama, discoverer of the sea route to
India in 1498The art of navigation was developed on the river Sindh 6,000 years ago. The very word navigation is derived from the Sanskrit word "nav gatih". The word "navy" is also derived from Sanskrit "nou".
In the 5th century C.E. Bhaskaracharya calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun, hundreds of years before the astronomer Smart. Time taken by earth to orbit the sun then was computed as 365.258756484 days.
The value of pi was calculated first by Budhayana, and he explained the wider ramifications of what is known as the Theorem of Pythagoras. He discovered this in the 6th century, long before the Arab and European mathematicians.
Algebra, Trigonometry, and the basic concept of Calculus came from India. Quadratic equations were propounded by Sridharacharya in the 11th century. The largest number the Greeks and the Romans used was 106 whereas Hindus used numbers as large as 1053 with specific assigned names as early as 5000 B.C., even during the Vedic period.
Hindus created the largest measure of time, called "kalpa", which is the time between the birth and annihilation of the universe. This measure comes very close to the currently accepted life span, according to the pulsating theory of the universe, which is around 25 billion years.
