Agenda

Workshop ERC EarlyModernCosmology presents

Political Economy of
Computational Work in History:
The case of the Vernacular
Math Traditions in India

Senthil Babu
French Institute of Pondicherry (India) and Visiting Scholar at Ca’ Foscari University Venice

&

Roy Wagner
Chair, History and Philosophy of Mathematics, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, ETH Zurich (CH)

Introduction by prof. Pietro Omodeo

If counting, measuring and weighing were central to computational practices at work and in learning, how could we reconstruct histories of mathematics as history of socio economic
practices performed by people, as part of their working lives. Ours is a project to attempt such histories and to retrieve historical sources that would make such histories possible, in the Indian subcontinent. For now, we will focus on the two South Indian regions, speaking Tamil and Malayalam. We will share our main concerns, ideas and action plan of our work in the coming years, while discussing existing historiographies of mathematics in relation to our work. We see this as an opportunity to invite suggestions and feedback to ways in which we could take our work forward.