A Sanskrit music scholar in 13th century India worked out how to recover a particular arrangement of notes from its number in a list. Centuries later, Donald Knuth recognised the computer science in work like this. Yes, the Donald Knuth who wrote The Art of Computer Programming.... In an ACM interview, he recalled reading translations of 13th-century Sanskrit works and said some of those Indian musicians "would have been computer scientists if they were living today." His written history of combinatorics points to Sharngadeva's Sangitaratnakara, a Sanskrit treatise on music. The problem sounds musical: how do you systematically list the possible orderings of a set of notes? But the text goes further. Given an arrangement, find its position in the list. Given the position, reconstruct the arrangement. That second operation is worth pausing over. You have the number of an entry, but not the entry itself. How do you recover it without first writing out everything that comes before it? The methods use a representation based on factorials, with a table supporting the conversion. These operations are now called ranking and unranking: moving from an arrangement to its numerical address, and back again. This was not a Sanskrit verse that vaguely resembled a modern idea. It was a procedure for solving a precise problem, preserved in a music text. Knuth's interview does not name Sharngadeva. His separate written account does. There is no need to stretch that into a claim that modern computers copied the text. The remarkable part is already there: a medieval Indian music scholar working through the mathematics of finding one arrangement among many, in both directions. Sources: Sharngadeva, Sangitaratnakara, 1.4.60-71; Donald E. Knuth, "Two thousand years of combinatorics", Combinatorics: Ancient and Modern, OUP (2013); Knuth, ACM ByteCast, Episode 2; M. D. Srinivas, "Combinatorial Methods in Indian Music: Pratyayas in Sangitaratnakara of Sarngadeva". Photo 1 : Donald Knuth. Photo 2: His actual interview words about the Indian musicians who "would have been computer scientists if they were living today", highlighted in yellow. Photo 3: The key attribution page: Knuth explicitly names Sharngadeva's Sangitaratnakara and credits its earlier ranking/unranking algorithms and factorial representation. Photo 4: The technical explanation, highlighted: permutations of musical phrases, factorial representation, and the table for converting between a number and its representation.

A 72 year old man in Guntur got a knee replacement in June 2025. Within a month, the artificial joint was infected by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium resistant to a wide range of antibiotics, including carbapenems. Months of washouts, a spacer exchange, an arthroscopy and weeks of intravenous antibiotics followed. By Dec, his pain was 9/10. The infection kept returning. Doctors judged further surgery unsuitable given his age and condition. The team then tried bacteriophages: viruses that infect specific bacteria. For those interested in the science, this is where the work gets interesting.... Dr Sutharsan Govindarajan's phage lab at SRM University-AP tested the patient's own bacterial isolate against a panel of phages. 3 were selected and genome-sequenced. In lab tests, each phage alone initially killed bacteria, but this strain subsequently regrew. The 3 phage cocktail suppressed that regrowth. The cocktail was delivered into the infected knee through a drainage tube over 10 days. The antibiotic colistin was given alongside from day 2. Lab tests had shown that the combination worked better against this strain than either treatment alone. - On day 6, colistin was stopped after kidney function worsened. The phage treatment continued. - By day 10, tests of the joint fluid no longer detected the resistant bacterium. Pain had fallen from 9 to 2-3, and the man could walk independently again. His inflammation marker returned to normal a few days after treatment ended. - At 6 months, he remained antibiotic-free with no recurrence reported. A joint-fluid culture in June 2026 showed no growth of the pathogen. The clinical team was led by Dr Kalyan Chakravarthy Koganti at Samishta Hospital (SHRI), Guntur. The authors describe this as, to their knowledge, India's 1st reported successful phage treatment of a carbapenem-resistant prosthetic joint infection. Bharat is rising. 🙏🙏 Source: B. Sivaraj et al., "Adjunctive Phage Therapy for Carbapenem-Resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (CRPA) Prosthetic Knee Joint Infection in India: A Case Report", IJID Regions (2026), available online 14 October. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijregi.2026.101047. Photo 1: Dr Kalyan Chakravarthy Koganti and the research team. (Credit: T. Vijaya Kumar / The Hindu.) Photo 2: The actual paper's figure, including the patient's before/after knee photos, antibiotic-resistance results and recovery timeline. via Sivaraj et al., IJID Regions (2026), DOI: 10.1016/j.ijregi.2026.101047.

This is a fascinating story a young Brahmin who followed Euler's algebra without knowing English, later argued that Bhaskara, 700 years before him, had used the idea behind the differential calculus. Lancelot Wilkinson had lent a young Sanskrit scholar a copy of Euler's book. The young man had only just learnt European letters and numerals. Yet, Wilkinson wrote, he could follow every calculation. Many were "complete puzzles to me". His name was Bapu Deva Shastri.... Wilkinson went further. The pupil was "more fit to be my gooroo (Guru) than my shishya (scholar) in all mathematical question." By 1842 Bapu Deva was teaching European geometry at the Government Sanskrit College in Banaras. Then, on 4 May 1858, he signed a 4 page paper that challenged a received account of Indian mathematics. "It appears to be generally believed that the principle of the Differential Calculus was unknown to the ancient Hindu mathematicians. Allow me to correct this impression..." A 12th century astronomer sat at the centre of the argument. Bhaskaracharya. The question was specific. Find a planet's position today and again tomorrow, and you know how far it moved. But its speed did not stay the same through that day. What was its motion at one instant? Bapu Deva pointed to Bhaskara's two terms: rough daily motion, and tatkalika, the instantaneous motion. His paper explained a construction. Instead of following the bending arc, extend the motion along its tangent. Use similar triangles. A cosine appears in the instantaneous change of the sine. He set this beside a differential formula and argued Bhaskara was "fully acquainted with the principle of the Differential Calculus." In London, H.H. Wilson thought it "a matter of more than ordinary interest" and wanted it carefully tested. He asked the mathematician William Spottiswoode for an opinion. The reply came from 12 James Street, Buckingham Gate. 5 May 1859. Spottiswoode did not accept the whole claim. In the method as given, he found no allusion to infinitesimally small intervals of time and space, and nothing saying the method was approximate. But the letter did not stop there. Bhaskara's penetration was "in the highest degree remarkable". The formula and method bore "a strong analogy" to the corresponding process in modern mathematical astronomy. And of Bapu Deva: "We are much indebted to him for calling our attention to so important an element in the old Indian methods of calculation." The Royal Asiatic Society published the exchange in 1860, with a postscript from Spottiswoode putting the old calculation beside its modern counterpart. Bapu Deva's work went on. A volume of 1861 carried his English translation of the Surya Siddhanta, with Wilkinson's Siddhanta Siromani translation revised by him. On 4 July 1864 the Royal Asiatic Society elected him an Honorary Member. The printed list reads "Pandita Bapu Deva Sastri, Benares", beside Isvarachandra Vidyasagara, Bhau Daji and Syed Ahmad Khan. Sources: JASB vol. 27, pp. 213-216 (1858); JRAS vol. 17, pp. 221-222 (1860); S.R. Sarma, "Sanskrit as vehicle for modern science", p. 195 (quoting Wilkinson); RAS list of members, p. 15. Photo 1: Lancelot Wilkinson on young Bapu Deva: "utterly ignorant of English" yet follows every calculation in Euler's Algebra, and is "more fit to be my gooroo than my shishya." Source: S.R. Sarma, "Sanskrit as vehicle for modern science", p. 195, quoting Wilkinson. Photo 2: Bapu Deva's own claim, signed 4 May 1858: Bhaskaracharya "was fully acquainted with the principle of the Differential Calculus." Source: Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 27, p. 216. Photo 3: Spottiswoode's reply: no allusion to infinitesimal intervals in the method given, but Bhaskara's penetration is "in the highest degree remarkable" and bears "a strong analogy" to modern mathematical astronomy. Source: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 17 (1860), p. 222. Photo 4: Bapu Deva Shastri teaching at Queen's College, Varanasi, c. 1870. British Library, Photo 1000/46(4709), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.