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Aryabhata

About me



image

Statue of Aryabhata on the grounds of IUCAA,Pune. As there is no known information regarding his appearance, any image of Aryabhata originates from an artist's conception.

Born

476 CE
prob. Ashmaka

Died

550 CE

Era

Gupta era

Region

India

Main interests

MathematicsAstronomy

Notable ideas

Explanation of Lunar eclipse andSolar eclipseRotation of earth on its axisReflection of light by moon,<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Āryabha

Designation
Areas of Expertise
Research Projects

Aryabhata is the author of several treatises on mathematics and astronomy, some of which are lost.

His major work, Aryabhatiya, a compendium of mathematics and astronomy, was extensively referred to in the Indian mathematical literature and has survived to modern times. The mathematical part of the Aryabhatiya covers arithmeticalgebraplane trigonometry, and spherical trigonometry. It also contains continued fractionsquadratic equations, sums-of-power series, and a table of sines.

The Arya-siddhanta, a lost work on astronomical computations, is known through the writings of Aryabhata's contemporary, Varahamihira, and later mathematicians and commentators, including Brahmagupta and Bhaskara I. This work appears to be based on the older Surya Siddhanta and uses the midnight-day reckoning, as opposed to sunrise in Aryabhatiya. It also contained a description of several astronomical instruments: the gnomon (shanku-yantra), a shadow instrument (chhAyA-yantra), possibly angle-measuring devices, semicircular and circular (dhanur-yantra / chakra-yantra), a cylindrical stick yasti-yantra, an umbrella-shaped device called the chhatra-yantra, and water clocks of at least two types, bow-shaped and cylindrical.

A third text, which may have survived in the Arabic translation, is Al ntf or Al-nanf. It claims that it is a translation by Aryabhata, but the Sanskrit name of this work is not known.

Probably dating from the 9th century, it is mentioned by the Persian scholar and chronicler of India, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī.

Algebra

In Aryabhatiya, Aryabhata provided elegant results for the summation of series of squares and cubes

1^2 + 2^2 + \cdots + n^2 = {n(n + 1)(2n + 1) \over 6}

and

1^3 + 2^3 + \cdots + n^3 = (1 + 2 + \cdots + n)^2 (see squared triangular number)