We came from a great civilization.  The Romans would bring ships full of gold to India in order to trade for Indian goods.

In deference to Einstein, counting began as soon as men had fingers and toes. The world had many mathematical systems that were very sophisticated and capable. What Indians give the world was the symbols and a place holder ( even the symbols later changed completely). Indeed that positional notation from India leapfrogged mathematics. Note, much of modern advance mathematics hardly has a numeral in them and the concepts employed were not even possible a hundred years ago.

India did not give the world philosophy or grammar either or literature either. These are also native human intellectual artifacts and every culture had a creation myth and art and music etc. These appropriations as uniquely from India are grandiose pronouncements with no basis in fact. Indian did indeed have admirable philosophical systems and noteworthy analytic systems  not broached by other culture until centuries later. But they did appear and independently and in most instances vastly more complete.

As for grammar, that is a no brainier. There has never been a mute modern human. Language and grammar are native to us as a specie and is being invented and reinvented all the time. In a small area between the highlands of central Papua new Guinea we have some 1000 languages as sophisticated and complete as any that ever existed. As Chomsky informed us, we are born with a "mentalese" ( the temp[late for language) that is common to all humans and hardwired in the brain and knowable to all whenever it is expressed.  Languages  is also the domain of human children who we can see autonomously creating complex and unique grammatical systems everywhere a creole exist.

Indian trigonometric functions are also different and we know Indians did not build the pyramids so the Egyptians knew of these functions as well. I would conceded to the modern quadratic function though here again forms of it preexisted the Indian construct by over a thousand years. 

The problem with appropriations of this sort is that it is always "we did it this way" first while others who did it their way does not count. Humans are remarkable and every culture has seminal contributions an all of us borrow liberally. There are special places in the house of intellect for specific ancient cultures compared to others and Indians, Egyptians, Babylonians and the Greeks occupy their own rooms but so does the Mayans, the Nubian and the Chinese. 

Who we are as a people today is especially on the minds of western thinkers who advanced us to this point so how do we value them  and whose insights have leapfrogged us into the modern era in increments of thousandfold beyond anything conceivable of earlier thinkers.  Where would we be without Newton, the Bernoulli brothers, Gauss, Hilbert. Jacobi, Euler, Russell, Husserl etc? It is pure arrogance to appropriate knowledge as the product of some "great culture".

BTW even the last claim that Guyanese indentured were literate is on its face a falsehood. Most were sudras ( 86 percent by some accounting) so they were prohibited from reading that kind of study explicitly. The Brahmins and many Muslims were indeed literate.

A persons worth is on account of their existence as a human being not on account of any external parameters. That is something we ought to focus on rather than counting who was the first to do this or that.

Danyael, thanks for sharing your wisdom.

I should point out that my grandfather was a kshatriya, the one who knew how to read Hindi and Sanskrit.

If ever I need a quick essay, I know who to ask

Me, correct???