| ▲ | agumonkey 6 hours ago | |
I'm always surprised by the abstraction level of Sanskrit ideas. Very rapidly they talk about infinite ways of assembling rules. Was there even a strong motivation (economic or logistical value) behind this? | ||
| ▲ | srean 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |
I don't know enough to know why, but they were very interested in the extremes of size, both large and small, as well as the notion of infinite. Fascination with the large seems to be a pan-cultural thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_large_numbers The article does not talk about Mayan numbers, I would hazard a guess that they were interested in large numbers too. There is also the Buddhist myth of Buddha enumerating a list of very large numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa%E1%B9%83khyeya https://jain108academy.com/buddha-recites-to-infinity-a-love... Large numbers also show up in that problem posed by Archimedes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27s_cattle_problem https://sites.google.com/site/largenumbers/home/2-3/p12_2-3-... | ||