"As the crests on the heads of peacocks, as the gems on the hoods of snakes, so is gaṇita at the top of the sciences." The oldest known ranking of mathematics as the supreme science is a Vedic-era verse — from the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa, the astronomy-calendar manual of the late Vedic period. Not merely useful, not merely sacred: mathematics as the ornament that crowns everything else. Entire civilizations have honored mathematics; this one wrote the compliment into scripture-adjacent curriculum, and it stuck for three thousand years.