Some 80 participants from India and a few foreign countries attended the event. Invited eminent speakers included Professors SG Dani, UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, Mumbai; PP Divakaran, IUCAA, Pune; Atul Dixit, IIT Gandhinagar; Amartya K Dutta, ISI Kolkata; Clemency Montelle, Canterbury University, New Zealand; Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay, RKM Residential College, Kolkata; Kim Plofker, Union College, Schenectady, USA; K Ramasubramanian, IIT Bombay; MD Srinivas, Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai; MS Sriram, University of Madras, Chennai; Venketeswara Pai, IISER Pune; and Michel Danino, IIT Gandhinagar. Besides, nine speakers presented brief papers selected from a number of submissions.
The presentations threw fresh light on India’s advances in ancient to twentieth-century Indian mathematics. Some lectures were of a general, popular or historical nature, thus accessible to a wider audience, while others explored more technical issues and methods.
On the second day of the conference, a book on Karanapaddhati of Putumana Somayaji, co-authored by Dr Venketeswara Pai and three other scholars and dealing with special astronomical computation techniques of Kerala, was released by Prof S G Dani.
