Brahmagupta and the Void

A small setback today: another letter to the Center for the Study of the Living Deceased has been returned, unopened. How they can simply ignore my research is beyond human understanding. Adding insult to injury, the Sheriff’s Department rejected my request to conduct a seminar for the officers on Tzombi tolerance (this, despite their so-called public relations campaign to promote tolerance in the greater Los Angeles area).

Doubters and racists can turn a blind eye and pretend that the Tzombi race never existed. Meanwhile I am gathering a mountain of evidence which will soon be impossible to ignore.

I cite as an example the account of Sir Arthur Crawley, writing his Lives of the Mathematicians in the early 1800’s, who brings to light a few facts about the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta which might otherwise have been lost to the ages.

Brahmagupta’s major contribution to mathematics was in treating zero as a number in its own right, and in establishing a set of rules for working with negative numbers. Sir Crawley describes a near-fatal rodent attack which had Brahmagupta laid up for a number of days, presumed dead. He writes:

Upon recovery, Brahmagupta refused all nourishment and devoted
the lion’s share of his time in contemplation of the “cow’s udder,”
the large crater near his home town of Ujjain, which exerted a peculiar
fascination on him.

A rare order form—rare because of the scarcity of paper at the time but presumably necessary due to its unusual nature—details Brahmagupta’s request for a “black bowl, the lip of which is a zero and which, when set upright, represents a fortune, and which when set downright, represents a debt.” The bowl has never been discovered and is presumed destroyed, but several artists’ renditions have been created. I regret that I have been unable to secure the permission to use these images on this blog; however I have attempted with my own hand (a hand not untried in illustration) to render them:

1) Fortune (in Positive Numbers):



2) Debt (in Negative Numbers):



3) A View from Above:



Not surpringly, six months after the date of the order slip, Brahmagupta completed his Brahmasphutasiddhinta, or “The Opening of the Universe.”