"There is other circumstantial evidence of transmission of calculus to Europe. Clavius’ contemporary, Julius Scaliger, is credited with Julian day-number system which is the same as the Indian ahargan.a. Likewise, another contemporary Tycho Brahe, Royal Astronomer to the Holy Roman Empire, produced the Tychonic astronomical model (in which all planets go round the Sun, which itself goes round the earth) which is just a carbon copy of the astronomical model of Nı̄lakant.ha, stated in his Tantrasangraha. Tycho’s masonry instruments (copied from Ulugh Beg’s Samarkand observatory) were not accurate enough to make accurate observations of Mars, such as made by Parameswaran over a 50 year period. Nevertheless, Tycho, in those days of the Inquisition, kept some secret documents with which his assistant Kepler decamped, after Tycho’s untimely death or murder. Why did Tycho keep mere observations such a secret from his own assistant? How did Kepler, a nearly blind person, arrive at those super-accurate observations, without appropriate instruments?"
C. K. Raju

January 1, 1970