Maharishi’s Vedic Mathematics: The Fulfillment of Modern Mathematics Catherine A. Gorini, PhD Department of Mathematics Maharishi University of Management Fairfield, IA, USA cgorini@mum.edu http://www.mum.edu/math_dept/faculty/gorini.shtml Mathematics is a highly praised discipline. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the great German scientist and mathematician, held mathematics to be the “queen of the sciences.” The Pythagoreans felt that “all is number” and the ancient Greeks included arithmetic and geometry as two of the four parts of the quadrivium, the core of their educational system. Jyotish Vedanga says, “Like the crest of a peacock, like the gem on the head of a snake, so is mathematics at the head of all knowledge.” The purpose of this paper is to show how the discipline of modern mathematics finds its fulfillment in the Vedic Mathematics of His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and to invite every individual to gain the full benefit of Maharishi’s Vedic Mathematics. The Nature of Mathematics Mathematics is as old as civilization itself; every culture that has left written records has also left indications of mathematical activity. Mathematics is validated by reasoning and logic and is eternally true. The mathematics known to the ancients is still correct and valid today. Results stated long ago without proof, for example formulas discovered by the ancient Egyptians or given in the Sulba Sutras, have been shown to be correct later. Even the gaps in Euclid’s reasoning that were first identified only toward the end of the 19th century have been filled without invalidating any of his conclusions. Other sciences, however, are continually being reformulated and refined. It is not unusual for a scientific theory to be completely repudiated on the basis of new experimental results. Even older results that are still used today, such as Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation, are at best only approximations of reality. Mathematics, like the sciences, studies patterns and relationships, but it is the nature of the patterns and relationships studied by mathematics that sets mathematics apart from the sciences and ensures that mathematical results are enduring. Physics describes regularities in the behavior of physical phenomena; chemistry studies how atoms and molecules interact with one another; and biology investigates the laws governing living systems. Mathematics, in contrast, has more abstract objects of study—numbers and their operations in arithmetic and algebra, geometrical shapes and their properties in geometry. Numbers, circles, and squares are not concrete physical objects the way organisms, cells, and molecules are. They are more abstract even than the unseen forces of physics, which nevertheless influence matter in a direct and measurable way. Mathematical objects are purely conceptual; Plato (Calinger, 1982, p. 65) describes them as “those absolute objects which cannot be seen otherwise than by thought.” The procedures for doing mathematics are also very different from procedures used in the sciences, which constantly refer to physical observations and measurements. Mathematics