"Notes from a China Visit"
Speaker : Prof. Shailaja D Sharma
Adjunct Professor, Dept of Humanities/ Mathematics Heritage Initiative, NIAS
@ :shailaja@nias.res.in
Chairperson : Prof. Sharada Srinivasan
Professor, School of Humanities, NIAS
@ :sharadasrini@nias.res.in
Date : 4th September, 2026
Time : 3.30 PM
Venue : Conference Hall -2
Abstract: A visit to China will not fail to impress upon the mind of the visitor the scope and scale of the economic rise of China and the central role of the Chinese Party-State in it. An Indian visitor will no doubt make mental comparisons as well. Over a brief visit of 2 weeks to Shanghai, I attended a week's worth of talks at Fudan University's School of International Relations on the emerging geo-political situation and read two scholarly books on the modern history of China. I also visited about ten museums, including "live museums" (preserved heritage sites) and interacted with scholars, students and some general public. Further, I delivered a talk on the History of Mathematics at Fudan University's India Centre. Understanding China is not an easy task, but there are curious parallels with India in some of their historical events and personalities and also in their contemporary thinking. In this "non-expert" and perhaps travelogue-like talk I shall highlight why my very Indian notion that "entities may be diverse" is reinforced by my visit to China.
About the speaker: Shailaja D Sharma teaches Mathematics and Statistics at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. She contributed to and co-edited the volume “The Computation Meme: Computational Thinking in the Indian Tradition” (IISc Press, 2024). Also to her credit is the “Chausar Distribution”, a discrete probability distribution based on Indian oblong playing dice, which she introduced at the International Conference on the History of Mathematics in January, 2024. She is interested in questions of epistemology in Indian scientific and mathematical thought in pre-colonial times, and in decolonizing the history of mathematics. She frequently speaks and writes on this theme.