Aryabhata
476–550 · South Asia · Medieval
Astronomer-mathematician who advanced the place-value system and zero.
Portrait: Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
- Birthplace
- South Asia
- Known as
- Astronomer-mathematician who advanced the place-value system and zero.
Aryabhata was born in 476 CE and worked at Kusumapura, near modern Patna, in the age of the Gupta empire — the first of the great mathematician-astronomers of classical India.
In a single work of 108 verses, the Aryabhatiya, he set down mathematics and astronomy of startling reach: an approximation of pi accurate to four places, tables of the sine that would pass through Arabic into the trigonometry of the world, and methods for computing eclipses.
Against the belief of his age he held that the earth turns on its own axis, and that the apparent wheeling of the stars is the motion of the ground beneath us — a truth the world would take a thousand years to accept.
He died about 550 CE. His work, carried west by Arabic translators, helped shape the science of both Islam and Europe. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.
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Sources
- MacTutor History of Mathematics — Aryabhata I (mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk)
- Encyclopædia Britannica — Aryabhata (www.britannica.com)
- Wikipedia — Aryabhata (en.wikipedia.org)
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