He [Swathi Thirunal] read a chapter of Malcolm’s Central India; the Governor-general’s Persian Letter … a passage in Sanskrit; another in Malayalam, and seemed equally clever at each. He then took up a book of Mathematics, and selecting the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, sketched the figure on a country slate; what astonished me most, was his telling us in English that geometry was derived from the Sanskrit, which was ‘jaw meter’ to measure the earth, and that many of our mathematical terms were also derived from the same source, such as hexagon, heptagon, octagon, decagon, dodecagon etc.. This promising boy is now, the rising sun of the country…

Historian & former Registrar, University of Kerala