My friend, Raj Vedam, told me about Madhava of Sangamagrama.

The Kerala school was well known in the 15th and 16th centuries, in the period of the first contact with European navigators in the Malabar Coast. At the time, the port of Muziris, near Sangamagrama, was a major center for maritime trade, and a number of Jesuit missionaries and traders were active in this region. Given the fame of the Kerala school, and the interest shown by some of the Jesuit groups during this period in local scholarship, some scholars, including G. Joseph of the U. Manchester have suggested[26] that the writings of the Kerala school may have also been transmitted to Europe around this time, which was still about a century before Newton.

All this time I thought Richard Newton^* (oops, I mean Sir Isaac Newton) was the foundation of my career in high tech. I was first introduced to Newton’s method for solving non-linear equations in a college freshman seminar on computers. I could never have imagined that the introduction to that mathematical technique would be the foundation of a good part of my career in software engineering.

^*Richard Newton was a professor at the University of California in Berkeley who did have a significant influence on my career.