C. M. Whish
Charles Matthew Whish(1794–1833) was anEnglishcivil servantin the Madras Establishment of theEast India Company.Whish was the first to bring to the notice of the western mathematical scholarship the achievements of theKerala school of astronomy and mathematics.Whish wrote in his historical paper:[1]Kerala mathematicians had... laid the foundation for a complete system offluxions...and their works... abound with fluxional forms and series to be found in no work of foreign countries.[2] Whish was also alinguistand had prepared a grammar and a dictionary of theMalayalamlanguage.[3][4]
C.M. Whish was a collector of palm-leafmanuscriptsinSanskritand other languages. After his premature death in 1833 at the age of thirty-eight years, Whish's brother, J.L. Whish, who was also employed in the service ofEast India Companydeposited these manuscripts in theRoyal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Irelandin July 1836. A catalogue of these manuscripts list 195 items.[5]Though the manuscripts collected by Whish are not distinguished by great age, there are many rare and valuable ones among them. Perhaps the most important of all are the Mahabharatamanuscripts which represent a distinct recension of the great epic. These manuscripts were related a wide range of subjects:vedic literature,ancientepic poetry,classical SanskritLiterature, and technical and scientific literature.
He joined the service ofEast India Companyin 1812 as Register of Zillah Court in SouthMalabarand rose up the judicial ladder to become finally a Criminal Judge atCuddapah.[6]Cuddapah Town Cemetery had a tomb in the name of C.M. Whish with the inscription "Sacred to the memory of C.M. Whish, Esquire of the Civil Service, who departed this life on the 14th April 1833, aged 38 years".[7]
References
[edit]- ^Whish, Charles M.(1834)."XXXIII. On the Hindú Quadrature of the Circle, and the infinite Series of the proportion of the circumference to the diameter exhibited in the four S'ástras, the Tantra Sangraham, the Yucti Bháshá, Carana Padhati, and Sadratnamáka".Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society.3(3): 509–523.doi:10.1017/S0950473700001221.JSTOR25581775.
- ^J J O'Connor and E F Robertson (November 2000)."An overview of Indian mathematics".School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland.Retrieved19 December2009.
- ^S. Muthiah (18 February 2002)."The college on College Road".The Hindu.Archived fromthe originalon 27 June 2003.Retrieved19 December2009.
- ^Madras Tercentenary Celebration Committee (1939).Madras Tercentenary Commemoration Volume.Asian Educational Services. p. 401.
- ^Compiled by Dr. M. Winternitz, Professor in the German University of Prague, ed. (1902).A catalogue of south Indian Sanskrit manuscripts: especially those of the Whish collection belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1902).The Royal Asiatic Society.Retrieved20 December2009.
- ^Joseph, George Gheverghese (1995). "Cognitive encounters in India during the age of imperialism".Race & Class.36(3): 39–56.doi:10.1177/030639689503600303.S2CID143453617.
- ^List of European tombs in the district of Cuddapah with inscriptions therein compiled by C.H. Mounsey(PDF).1893.[permanent dead link]
Further reading
[edit]- O'Connor, John J.;Robertson, Edmund F.(2016)."Charles Matthew Whish".MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive.University of St. Andrews.Retrieved21 September2020.