DellCarone401 at 16:05, 8 May 2025

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'''Charles Matthew Whish''' (1794–1833) was an English [[civil servant]] in the Madras Establishment of the [[East India Company]]. Whish was the first to bring to the notice of the western mathematical scholarship the achievements of the [[Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics]]. Whish wrote in his historical paper:<ref>{{cite journal |last=Whish |first=Charles M. |author-link=C. M. Whish |year=1834 |title=XXXIII. On the Hindú Quadrature of the Circle, and the infinite Series of the proportion of the circumference to the diameter exhibited in the four S'ástras, the Tantra Sangraham, the Yucti Bháshá, Carana Padhati, and Sadratnamáka |journal=[[Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society]] |volume=3 |issue=3 |pages=509–523 |url=https://archive.org/details/transactionsofro03asia/page/509/ |doi=10.1017/S0950473700001221 |jstor=25581775 |jstor-access=free }}</ref> Kerala mathematicians had ''... laid the foundation for a complete system of [[Differential calculus|fluxion]]s ...'' and their works ''... abound with fluxional forms and series to be found in no work of foreign countries''.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Indian_mathematics.html|title=An overview of Indian mathematics|last=J J O'Connor and E F Robertson|date=November 2000 |publisher= School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland |accessdate=19 December 2009}}</ref>
Whish was also a [[linguist]] and had prepared a grammar and a dictionary of the [[Malayalam]] language.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/02/18/stories/2002021800210300.htm|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030627194813/http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/02/18/stories/2002021800210300.htm|url-status=dead|archive-date=27 June 2003|title=The college on College Road |last=S. Muthiah |date=18 February 2002|work=The Hindu|accessdate=19 December 2009}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Madras Tercentenary Celebration Committee|title=Madras Tercentenary Commemoration Volume|publisher=Asian Educational Services|year=1939|pages=401}}</ref>

C.M. Whish was a collector of palm-leaf [[manuscript]]s in [[Sanskrit]] and other languages. After his premature death in 1833 at the age of thirty-eight years, Whish's brother, J.L. Whish, who was also employed in the service of [[East India Company]] deposited these manuscripts in the [[Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland]] in July 1836. A catalogue of these manuscripts list 195 items.<ref>{{cite book|title=A catalogue of south Indian Sanskrit manuscripts : especially those of the Whish collection belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1902)|editor=Compiled by Dr. M. Winternitz, Professor in the German University of Prague|publisher=The Royal Asiatic Society|year=1902|url=https://archive.org/details/catalogueofsouth00roya|accessdate=20 December 2009}}</ref> Though the manuscripts collected by Whish are not distinguished
by great age, there are many rare and valuable ones among them. Perhaps the most important of all are the
[[Mahabharata]] manuscripts which represent a distinct recension of the great epic. These manuscripts were related a wide range of subjects: [[vedic literature]], ancient [[epic poetry]], [[classical Sanskrit]] Literature, and technical and scientific literature.

He joined the service of [[East India Company]] in 1812 as Register of Zillah Court in South [[Malabar (Northern Kerala)|Malabar]] and rose up the judicial ladder to become finally a Criminal Judge at [[Cuddapah]].<ref>{{cite journal|last=Joseph|first=George Gheverghese|year=1995|title=Cognitive encounters in India during the age of imperialism|journal=Race & Class|volume=36|issue=3|pages=39–56|doi=10.1177/030639689503600303|s2cid=143453617}}</ref> Cuddapah Town Cemetery had a tomb in the name of C.M. Whish with the inscription "Sacred to the memory of C.M. Whish, Esquire of the Civil Service, who departed this life on the 14th April 1833, aged 38 years".<ref>{{cite book|title=List of European tombs in the district of Cuddapah with inscriptions therein compiled by C.H. Mounsey|year=1893|url=https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/blewis/www/Cuddaph_tombs.pdf}}{{Dead link|date=July 2020 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref>

==References==
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==Further reading==
*{{cite web |last1=O'Connor |first1=John J. |last2=Robertson |first2=Edmund F. |author2-link=Edmund F. Robertson |title=Charles Matthew Whish |year=2016 |url=https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Whish/ |website=MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive |publisher=University of St. Andrews |accessdate=2020-09-21 }}

{{Indian mathematics}}

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[[Category:1794 births]]
[[Category:1833 deaths]]
[[Category:British orientalists]]

C. M. Whish - Revision history

DellCarone401 at 16:05, 8 May 2025