Person · mathematician & astronomer · India
Āryabhata
Also known as Aryabhata at Kusumapura
The late 5-century mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata (476-c.550 CE), who wrote the Aryabhatiya (499 CE) at age 23 — a 118-verse treatise on arithmetic, algebra, plane trigonometry, spherical trigonometry, and astronomy. Aryabhata introduced the sine function (jya), demonstrated that the Earth rotates on its axis (producing the apparent westward motion of the stars), accurately calculated the length of the solar year as 365.258 days, and estimated π as 3.1416. He identified his connection with Kusumapura (generally identified with Pataliputra / modern Patna), where he taught in the late Gupta court. The Kerala school's revival of Aryabhata's astronomical and trigonometric work by Madhava, Nilakantha and Jyeshthadeva (14-16 century) and the Islamic world's reception of Aryabhata through al-Khwarizmi's Zij al-Sindhind (c.820) are two major transmission threads.
- Date
- 476–550
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Patron dynasty
- Gupta-era
- Condition
- historical person
- River basin
- Ganga
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — established Kusumapura association; birthplace disputed
- Location
- 25.610, 85.140
About the place
Placed at Pataliputra. He says himself that he wrote at Kusumapura, which is generally identified with Pataliputra, and that is the only geographical statement about him in his own work.
Connections (2)
- Life routePātaliputra
Āryabhata says he wrote at Kusumapura, which is generally identified with Pātaliputra, the old Magadhan capital and then a Gupta centre. He was twenty-three. The Āryabhatīya's claim that the earth rotates and that eclipses are shadows was rejected by most later Indian astronomers including Brahmagupta, who attacked him directly, so the tradition's most radical statement was made at its beginning and then argued down for a thousand years.
- CampaignBrahmagupta
Brahmagupta attacked Āryabhata by name on the rotation of the earth and on several computational points, in the aggressive style Sanskrit scientific literature used for disagreement. He was also the first anywhere to set out rules for zero as a number and for negative quantities, which he called debts, so the man who got the cosmology wrong got the arithmetic right and both positions travelled together to Baghdad.
On these journeys
Sources
MacTutor History of Mathematics, Aryabhata I; Aryabhatiya and modern histories of Indian mathematics.
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