Vedic Mathematics is a book written by Indian Shankaracharya Bharati Krishna Tirtha and first published in 1965. It contains a list of mathematical techniques which were falsely claimed to contain advanced mathematical knowledge. The book was posthumously published under its deceptive title by editor V. S. Agrawala, who noted in the foreword that the claim of Vedic origin, made by the original author and implied by the title, was unsupported.
Neither Krishna Tirtha nor Agrawala were able to produce sources, and scholars unanimously note it to be a compendium of methods for increasing the speed of elementary mathematical calculations sharing no overlap with historical mathematical developments during the Vedic period. Nonetheless, there has been a proliferation of publications in this area and multiple attempts to integrate the subject into mainstream education at the state level by right-wing Hindu nationalist governments. Tirtha stated that no part of advanced mathematics lay beyond the realms of his book and propounded that studying it for a couple of hours every day for a year equated to spending about two decades in any standardised education system to become professionally trained in the discipline of mathematics.
Reprints were published in 1975 and 1978 to accommodate typographical corrections. Several reprints have been published since the 1990s.
Hartosh Singh Bal notes that whilst Krishna Tirtha's attempts might be somewhat acceptable in light of his nationalistic inclinations during colonial rule—he had left his spiritual endeavors to be appointed as the principal of a college to counter Macaulayism—it provided a fertile ground for further ethnonationalist abuse of historiography by Hindu nationalist parties; Thomas Trautmann views the development of Vedic Mathematics in a similar manner. Meera Nanda has noted hagiographic descriptions of Indian knowledge systems by various right-wing cultural movements (including the BJP), which have deemed Krishna Tirtha to be in the same league as Srinivasa Ramanujan. Others have viewed the works as an attempt at harmonising religion with science.
Originality of methods
Dani speculated that Krishna Tirtha's methods were a product of his academic training in mathematics