Albert Einstein quote about Computation(Maths) :

“We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made”

— Albert Einstein

Read this Quote in Bengali

Know source and context of this Quote :

The source is not yet known. Some have expressed doubts as to whether the quote is actually from Albert Einstein. Barbara Wolff is one of them. Quoting Tom Macfarlane, a former archivist at the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem, she states that Albert Einstein never made such a quote anywhere. She writes:

"We owe a lot to the Indians…”

During all the years I earned my living by identifying the most wacky and the most sophisticated quotes attributed to Einstein for researchers, I never saw or heard about this quote.

I understand that, today, this one is a quite popular “Einstein quote”, so I checked my sources, printed material and personal notes, but to no avail: such a statement does not appear among Einstein’s known utterances.

He did not mention anything like that in his discussions with Rabindranath Tagore, nor in his correspondence with Gandhi or with any other Indian pen pal. I did not find it in his - published as well as unpublished - correspondence with mathematicians or other people to whom he might have said something someway similar, and not even in an essay about Einstein - Tehrani - Tagore.

So in short, the question “Why did he say this?” is unanswerable for the simple reason that most likely this statement is just one of the many - popular! - “Einstein quotes” which have been invented / fabricated by a joker who was aware that this very quote “by Peter Pan” or “by Suzy Chaudhury” would not have the same impact as “by Albert E.”

[Why “most likely” ? Because even the most experienced expert can not know what Einstein told his girlfriend quietly in the middle of the night or his little son on a walk through the park.]