"Tell me, charming woman, the number of bees." That is a line from a 1150 CE mathematics textbook. The Līlāvatī — by tradition named for Bhāskara II's daughter — teaches arithmetic in Sanskrit verse: bee swarms dividing among jasmine and pandanus blossoms, pearl strings scattering in a lover's quarrel, elephants wandering into the forest. It remained the standard textbook of the subcontinent for some 700 years. A problem set, written as literature — and it worked.