University of California, Berkeley

Speaker: Ravi Kumar
Pictures

As part of the Speaker on Campus series, HSC on UC Berkeley campus, hosted the lecture on Vedic Mathematics by Sri Ravi Kumarji. Everyone who attended his lecture really enjoyed it and learned a lot from it.

Though the lecture was only supposed to last for an hour and a half, everyone was so into it that Raviji spoke for almost two hours. Raviji started with some background about Hinduism's and ancient India's contributions to the world and how many of the things that we take for granted today actually have Indian origins. For example, the names of the months in a year and days of the week and even the number of days in a week. He even mentioned how pancAngam is very scientific. From there he moved on to Vedic math formulas. Everyone loved these easy formulas which actually gave very long and complicated answers! For example we divided 1 by 29 and found the answer to 28 decimal place accuracy in just 20 seconds!!! We all took turns writing on the board and discussing these cool math formulas!

Raviji concluded by connecting our scriptures with science and quoted many examples of how all the teachings of our fore fathers and ancient texts are scientific. He also gave several examples of western philosophers, thinkers and scientists who were all inspired by Hindu texts. He said that "pUrNa mada, pUrNamidam…" shloka is actually nothing but L'Hopital's rule. His message for the day was to get a better understanding of Vedas, their teachings and that way of life and carry on these traditions and teachings to the future generations. Raviji once again made us feel proud of our culture and traditions and motivated us to learn more!