Editing George Everest (section)

===Early career in India===
Little is known about Everest's earliest years in India, but when he first arrived in the country at 16 years old he showed a talent for mathematics and astronomy. He was seconded to [[British Java|Java]] in 1814, where Lieutenant-Governor [[Stamford Raffles]] appointed him to survey the island.<ref name=jrs/> Everest returned to Bengal in 1816, where he improved British knowledge of the [[Ganges]] and the [[Hooghly River]]. He later surveyed a [[semaphore]] line from [[Calcutta]] to [[Benares]], covering approximately {{convert|400|mi|km}}. Everest's work came to the attention of Colonel [[William Lambton]], the leader of the [[Great Trigonometrical Survey]] (GTS), who appointed him as his chief assistant. He joined Lambton at [[Hyderabad|Hyderabad, India]] in 1818, where he was in the process of surveying a [[meridian arc]] northward from [[Cape Commorin]]. He was responsible for much of the fieldwork, but then in 1820 contracted [[malaria]], necessitating a period of recovery spent at the [[Cape of Good Hope]] in [[South Africa]].<ref name=odnb/>

Recovering from malaria, Everest returned to India in 1821. He succeeded Lambton as superintendent of the GTS upon Lambton's death in 1823, and during the following years extended his predecessor's efforts on the arc up to [[Sironj]], in present-day [[Madhya Pradesh]]. Everest was prone to suffer from poor health, however, and the effects of a bout of fever and rheumatism left him half paralysed. He returned to England in 1825, where he spent the following five years recuperating. During that time, Everest was elected as a [[Fellow of the Royal Society]] in March 1827. Most of his free time was spent lobbying the East India Company for better equipment and studying the methods used by the [[Ordnance Survey]]; he frequently corresponded with [[Thomas Frederick Colby]].<ref name=odnb/>

He became acquainted with Indian thought, according to his niece Mary Boole:<ref>{{Cite book|last=Mary Everest Boole|url=http://archive.org/details/indianthoughtwes00bool|title=Indian Thought and Western Science in the Nineteenth Century|date=1901|publisher=The Ceylon National Review|others=Library Genesis|language=English}}</ref>
{{Blockquote| My uncle, George Everest, was sent to India in 1806 at the age of sixteen.&nbsp;[...] the boy went out ignorant, un-spoiled and fresh. He made the acquaintance of a learned Brahman who taught him—not the details of his own ritual, as European missionaries do, but—the essential factor in all true religion, the secret of how man may hold communion with the Infinite Unknown.}}

It is very likely he introduced Indian thought to others as well:

{{Blockquote| Some time about 1825, he came to England for two or three years, and made a fast and lifelong friendship with [[John Herschel|Herschel]] and with [[Charles Babbage|Babbage]], who was then quite young.(.) My uncle returned from india. He never interfered with anyone's religious beliefs or customs. But no one under his influence could continue to believe in anything in the Bible being specially sacred, except the two elements which it has in common with other sacred books: the knowledge of our relation to others and of man's power to hold direct converse with the unseen truth.}}