25/11/2021
"RADHANATH SIKDAR" The man Behind Mount Everest
Radhanath, a student of the college since 1824, was one of the first two Indians to read Isaac Newton's Principia ... A great mathematician and a Geodetic SURVEYOR.
He was in the team of Sir George Everest, who was the head of the survey and map-making organization Survey of India
The brilliant mathematician, who had perhaps never seen Mount Everest, discovered in 1852 that Kangchenjunga, which was considered to be the tallest in the world, wasn’t really so.
It was during the computations of the northeastern observations that Radhanath had calculated the height of Peak XV at exactly 29,000 ft (8839 m), but Colonel Waugh added an arbitrary two feet because he was afraid that the Sikdar’s figure would be considered a rounded number rather than an accurate one
After four long and arduous years of unscrambling mathematical data, and with the help of Theodolite and linear measurements Radhanath Sickdhar had managed to find out the height of Peak XV, an icy peak in the Himalayas
The mountain - later christened Mount Everest after Sir George Everest, the surveyor general of India - stood at 29,002 feet (8,840 metres).......
And his contribution was forgotten by the British government but The Department of Posts, Government of India, launched a postal stamp on 27 June 2004, commemorating the establishment of the Great Trigonometric Survey in Chennai,
