The Joy of
Programming
Believe It Or Not!
This month’s column is inspired by Ripley’s ‘Believe It Or Not’. We’ll look at some unusual facts about
the Indian connections and contributions to computer science. Even if you do not know much about
computers, I’m sure you will enjoy reading this!
Y
ou may not believe the following trivia, but that’s
where the fun lies!
A modern computer equivalent of a hashing
algorithm was used in Indian music a few centuries before
hashing was invented for use in computer data structures!
Hashing is a fundamental technique used to derive a
numeric key from a value to quickly find the index in a table.
Many lovers of Carnatic music know the ‘Katapayadi Sutra’
that is used to find the ‘Mela’ number from a ‘Mela’ name; what
they may now know is that it is in fact a hashing algorithm.
Hashing was originally developed by H.P. Luhn of IBM in
1953 for use in computers; though the ‘Katapayadi Sutra’ was
obviously not meant to be used for hash tables, it provided a
scheme to derive numbers from names, which is nothing but a
hashing algorithm as we know it today.
The word ‘algorithm’ traces its origins to the
Indian number system and algebra!
The word ‘algorithm’ comes from ‘al-Khwarizmi’, the name
of an Arabic mathematician who wrote a book on the Indian
number system and algebra. The West learnt the numbering
system mainly from this book and referred to the book on
Indian numbers as ‘al-Khwarizmi book’ which when written
and pronounced in Latin became the ‘algorism’ book. To quote
from wikipedia: “The word ‘algorism’ originally referred only
to the rules of performing arithmetic using Arabic numerals
but evolved via European Latin translation of al-Khwarizmi’s
name into ‘algorithm’ by the 18th century. The word evolved
to include all definite procedures for solving problems or
performing tasks.”
India built its first electronic computer—TIFRAC—
indigenously in 1956!
TIFRAC (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Automatic Calculator) built at TIFR, Mumbai, was the first
operational electronic computer developed in India. It
was built using vacuum tubes; had 2 KB of 40-bit memory
words; and programming was done in its assembly language.
Input was done using paper tapes and output with an
electronic typewriter. It was a huge machine with high power
consumption, but it was powerful enough for scientists from all
over India to come and use the computer!
Many of the ‘kolams’ (seen in south Indian homes)
are related to ‘fractals’ and can be generated by
computer programs.
S.G. Ganesh
Part I
If you travel in South India, particularly Tamil Nadu, you
can see beautiful ‘kolams’ on the floor in front of houses,
for decoration. They are related to ‘fractals’—self-similar
geometric figures—that are well known in computer science
in formal language theory and used extensively in image
processing and graphics. To quote from Marcia Ascher’s
book called Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of
Ideas Across Cultures: “In addition to their importance
to the people of Tamil Nadu, the creation of kolam designs
has become part of the computer science literature, serving
as examples for some types of languages. Thus, the kolam
provides an exemplar of the way mathematical ideas in
a traditional setting can reach beyond their own cultural
boundaries to enrich and contribute to scholarly interests.”
Figure 1: The ‘snake kolam’ that
can be produced from deterministic
context-free L-System
If you have any interesting ‘believe it or not’ trivia like
those featured here, do feel free to send them to me. 
Further reading & references
• ‘The Katapayadi Formula and the Modern Hashing
Technique’, A.V. Raman, IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing, 1997
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm#Origin_of_the_word
• www.ias.ac.in/resonance/May2008/p420-429.pdf
• ‘Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas
Across Cultures’, Marcia Ascher, Princeton University
Press, 2002
• The snake kolam image used in the article is
taken from coco.ccu.uniovi.es/malva/sketchbook/
lssketchbook/examples/fractal/fractal.htm
S.G. Ganesh is a research engineer in Siemens (Corporate
Technology). His latest book is “60 Tips on Object Oriented
Programming”, published by Tata McGraw-Hill in December
last year. You can reach him at sgganesh@gmail.com.
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