Person · mathematician & astronomer · India
Brahmagupta
Also known as Brahmagupta at Bhillamala / Bhinmal
The 7-century mathematician Brahmagupta (598-668 CE), who worked at the astronomical school associated with Bhillamala (Bhinmal, modern Rajasthan) under Chavda king Vyagrahamukha. His 628 CE Brahmasphutasiddhanta is the first known mathematical text to treat zero as a number (not just a placeholder), to formulate rules for arithmetic with zero and negative numbers, to give the first general solution of the quadratic equation (including both positive and negative roots), and to formulate Pell's equation (ax² + 1 = y²) with specific solutions. Brahmagupta's text reached the Abbasid Caliphate through Persian scholar al-Fazari's translation (c.770), where it entered Islamic mathematics as 'Sindhind' — the source of al-Khwarizmi's Zij al-Sindhind (c.820) and the subsequent Islamic transmission of Indian mathematics to medieval Europe.
- Date
- 598–668
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Condition
- historical person
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.000, 72.270
About the place
Placed at Bhinmal in southern Rajasthan, the Bhillamala of his own text, where he headed the astronomical school and wrote the Brahmasphutasiddhanta in 628.
Connections (3)
- CampaignĀryabhata
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.
- TransmissionChang’an / Xi’an, China
The Brāhmasphutasiddhānta reached Baghdad about 771, was translated into Arabic as the Sindhind, and is how the decimal place-value system with a zero entered Islamic mathematics and from there Europe. Al-Khwārizmī's arithmetic is built on it. The digits Europe calls Arabic numerals are the ones this book carried west, which is the single most consequential export in the history of Indian science.
- TransmissionBaghdad
An Indian astronomical work of the Brahmagupta tradition — the Sindhind of the Arabic sources — was brought to al-Mansur's Baghdad about 770 by an embassy from Sindh and translated by al-Fazari. With it came the decimal place-value numerals and the sine function. Al-Khwarizmi's arithmetic, written a few decades later, is what carried them onward; Europe called the method algorism after him and the digits Arabic, which is how India lost the credit twice over.
On these journeys
Sources
MacTutor History of Mathematics; Brahmasphutasiddhanta and modern histories of Indian mathematics.
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