79 - About Chess and Vedic Mathematics

VEDIC MATHEMATICS NEWSLETTER

ISSUE No. 79

A warm welcome to our new subscribers.
Vedic Mathematics is becoming increasingly popular as more and more people are introduced to the beautifully unified and easy Vedic methods. The purpose of this Newsletter is to provide information about developments in education and research and books, articles, courses, talks etc., and also to bring together those working with Vedic Mathematics. If you are working with Vedic Mathematics - teaching it or doing research - please contact us and let us include you and some description of your work in the Newsletter. Perhaps you would like to submit an article for inclusion in a later issue or tell us about a course or talk you will be giving or have given. If you are learning Vedic Maths, let us know how you are getting on and what you think of this system.

Since most readers of this newsletter are more interested in the news we are now putting the main article at the end of the news items.

This issue's article is About Chess and Vedic Mathematics by Didier Auroy, a maths teacher and chess enthusiast in Marseille, France.

________________________________________

This issue is all about new developments in the vedicmaths.org website:
1) Message from Webmaster - New Tutorials
2) New Online VM Journal
3) Another free book

Another newsletter will be forthcoming in a few days with other news items.

________________________________________

1) MESSAGE FROM WEBMASTER

This is to let you know about some updates we are making to the www.vedicmaths.org website.

Moving hosting providers
As we have been having problems with the company that hosts our website (recently none of our web pages would display correctly), we have decided
to move our website hosting provider.

This may cause some disruption to accessing the www.vedicmaths.org website over the next few days. Hopefully after this, access to the website will be more stable.

In preparation for this move we have a temporary website already setup on our new hosting providers called www.vedic-maths.co.uk

If you are having trouble getting onto the www.vedicmaths.org site, go to this site instead (this temporary site will become obsolete once we have successfully transferred to our new web hosting provider).

If there is any problem contacting us with the vedicmaths.org email addresses please use:

Thank you for your patience whilst we carry out this task.

Expansion of the Tutorial Material
When I first started helping Kenneth maintain the website, I created an interactive tutorial to help people get a feel for how Vedic Mathematics works.

The site access statistics for this page, which show this is our most visited page (approximately 600 visits a day over the last month), indicates the
success of this tutorial.

However it was highly limited in that the questions asked always remain the same. So the material can only be used once by a person, as they will probably remember the answers to the questions if they repeat the tests within a short period of time.

I started creating a more interactive set of tutorials that would change what questions they were asking, so that you could drill the material until it was permanently mastered. This was intended to be computerised versions of
some of Kenneth's books, which would be half way between a paper book and an actual teacher.

The aim was to create enough material to have a full course that the payments for, would fund the rest of the development of the material. However the development of this was like having two jobs at the same time, one to pay the bills and other to develop the Vedic Maths course. As this was too much, the development of the material came to a halt.

Funding/Donations Needed
As it has been several years since the partial development of this new tutorial material and no way of funding the development of it has appeared (government grants often come with conditions that you effectively give up your intellectual property rights to anything developed with the grant money), we have decided to release the initial few chapters that were developed with a request that users donate money to help fund the development of more
material (unless some sponsors can be found - please remember we do not wish to give up the intellectual property rights to the material).

The concept of funding the work via donations also fits in with some of the Vedic Traditions we have heard of, where the teaching was given for free and people give according to their means. Which means that the poor are never
restricted from being able to learn.

New Tutorials now Available for Free
The original tutorials were based on the book Fun with Figures, about half of which was made into tutorials - now the entire contents of that book (12 tutorials) are available.

In addition, the first chapter of the book "The Abridged Cosmic Computer" and the first chapter of the book "The Natural Calculator" can be viewed interactively - that is to say you can read, do exercises, get results and reset them to do the exercises again with different numbers.

We are hoping that the release of more tutorials will give Vedic Mathematics a higher educational profile and make it easier for people to start learning the subject.

We are already aware that the tutorial page we have created is our most popular web page. Achieving its own entry on most of the main search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Excite, AOL, AltaVista, Metacrawler etc.) usually above our main page. So there may be consequences of doing this
if we succeed in getting more visitors, in that we may have to purchase a more powerful web hosting package to deal with the demand.

We are initially trying to avoid advertising on the site as we consider this to be obtrusive and distracting from the learning experience. However if we cannot find a way of funding the development of further tutorial material it may come to this.

We are also aware that previously our work has been copied by others across the internet. We would ask that you respect the work that we have put into developing this educational material promoting Vedic Maths, and link to the material on our web site, rather than copying it.

Thank you
Clive Middleton (webmaster for vedicmaths.org)

2) VM ONLINE JOURNAL

Because of the many articles being submitted to us it has been decided to create an online Vedic Mathematics Journal for the more technical articles. The Journal can be accessed at: www.vedicmaths.org/Journal.asp. You are invited to submit your own article to us for consideration: please contact us at .

We will give a list of new articles in each future newsletter. Currently two new articles can be viewed:

"Triples and the Mandelbrot Set" by Kenneth Williams
Kenneth Williams is this newsletter editor and long-standing proponent of Vedic Maths. This article introduces the Mandelbrot Set and shows how it can be explained and constructed using Triples rather than the much more complicated approach through complex numbers. No prior knowledge of Triples or the Mandelbrot set necessary.

"Magic of Sub-Sutra" by Sarwan Aggarwal
Sarwan Aggarwal is an engineer and teacher who is a Certified Vedic Mathematics Teacher based in the USA. His article examines one of the Vedic sub-sutras "For 7 the Multiplicand is 143" and shows a surprising range of applications, that look almost like magic.

3) GEOMETRY FOR AN ORAL TRADITION Free Copy

There are now two free books on the website. "Geometry for an Oral Tradition" by Andrew Nicholas joins the VM Manual already there. This presents the kind of geometry system that might have existed before literacy was widespread. You will see the link on the home page.
A third free book will be added shortly.

****************************
This Issue's Article follows:

About Chess and Vedic Mathematics by Didier AUROY (France)

According to VM books, if the 16 Sutras (and the 14 sub-Sutras) are so useful for mental maths and in solving problems, it's mainly because those Sutras are very close to the way our brain works in everyday life. In fact, some days ago, I meet a young chess player who told me "playing chess is a great help for doing maths at school".

If they are so useful and similar to our brain activities, we could wonder whether they are used in other areas of intellectual or physical human activities.

Since I began to play chess as a regular player, I've often heard that "to be a chess player needs to be a maths lover". These "everyday life Sutras" are indeed very common in the speech of people who love short cuts, even if they don't understand why they are saying them.

So, recently, I decided to search if, really, chess and maths were similar, and in what way this similarity consists. To sum up my small researches, you can see below a table in which I linked the utilisation of the VM Sutras in maths and in chess.

Sutras ...........................................In V.M. ...In Chess
By One more than the One Before .....Yes ........Yes
All from 9 and the last from 10 ...........Yes
Vertically and Crosswise ....................Yes ........Yes
Transpose and Apply .........................Yes ........Yes
If the Samuccaya is the same, it's zero .Yes
If One is in ration, the other is zero ......Yes
By Addition and by Substraction .........Yes .......Yes
By the completion or non-completion ..Yes
Differential Calculus ............................Yes
By the deficiency ................................Yes
Specific and General ...........................Yes .......Yes
The remainder by the last digit .............Yes
The ultimate and twice the penultimate .Yes
By one less than the one before ...........Yes .......Yes
The product of the sum .......................Yes
By alternate Elimination and Retention .Yes .......Yes
Other Sutras .......................................Yes (sub-Sutras) Yes (more complex pure chess rules - see the end of this article)

In chess, By One more than the One Before could be that in a given position, you need one more piece to increase the pressure on the opponent's king.

Vertically and Crosswise is natural in chess where we are always dealing with columns rows and diagonals. You always act Vert. and Cross.

Transpose and Apply appears when a player encounters a position which makes him think of a past game (he played or he saw before) and which gave him an idea for his upcoming move.

By Addition and by Subtraction is common in chess since you try to keep your pieces on the board but you try to take the opposite ones away.

Specific and General could be when you know general rules but, like special multiplications in VM, it's better to act accordingly with what you have on the chess board.

By one less than the one before is famous in chess when you sacrifice a piece to open a way to the enemy's king.

By alternate Elimination and Retention appears when, for example, you make a piece sacrifice (Elimination) but you have no direct threats. The sacrifice was done to restrain (Retention) the opponent's pieces so that he can't make a good move.

So, you can see that, even if in chess the Sutras have not the same meaning as in VM, some of them can be transposed and applied in the two games.

In fact, my point of view is that the Sutras are surely used in other fields than chess, and maybe a reader can play the same game as me : searching where these Vedic Sutras are used, even if their meanings are a little bit different.

I think that the big common point between chess and VM is the ability, in both chess and VM, to learn more from a few rules by practising as much as possible. Curiosity is always stimulated, and basic rules or high level ones, even if you don't know all of them, allow you to make your own discoveries, your own new-rules and patterns, which can be incorporated in the above list. In that way, chess and maths are very similar. In that way, the scientist spirit grows up. And there are no limits of this extension. The more you learn, the more there is to learn. That is the big rule of human being's life. That's why teaching (maths or whatever subject) needs to be a living teaching. Mostly, in the Western world, maths is taught as a routine activity (in spite of all the computer, White Interactive Boards, Visual Devices), a repetitive activity, a boring activity. Chess and many others are always living activities, that's why games (in general) are so present in our world. That's why VM is so delightful to learn.

Such a comparison between VM and Chess only reflects my point of view. May be my "poetic transposition" of the Sutras to chess makes me go a little too far…

By writing that, it makes me think that, in fine, Sutras are used in everyday life (with a different meaning of course). VM, Chess, Life (and many other aspects of human being activities) are based on those Sutras. Our brain is always taking and giving (attention) to what is happening, we always transpose situations in others, we eliminate, retain, complete, judge, compare, search short cuts to give us more time and more energy. They are "human rules" and ignoring them means ignoring our Nature. Plato said "know thyself". V.M. gives us a way to do it, as chess, jogging, making bread, building a house, etc. do. But VM is easier and faster than anything I can think of at this moment.

Have fun doing whatever you choose !

****************************

Your comments about this Newsletter are invited.
If you would like to send us details about your work or submit an article or details about a course/talk etc. for inclusion, please let us know on

Previous issues of this Newsletter can be viewed and copied from the Web Site: www.vedicmaths.org
Please pass a copy of this Newsletter on to anyone you think may be interested.

Editor: Kenneth Williams

Visit the Vedic Mathematics web site at: http://www.vedicmaths.org
mailto:

29th March 2012


GTranslate

English Chinese (Traditional) Dutch Finnish French German Hindi Korean Russian Ukrainian