MesMath

Arya bhata

THE GREATEST  MATHEMATICIAN OF ALL TIME

Aryabhata was the first in the line of great mathematician-astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. His works include the aryabhatiya (499 CE, when he was 23 years old) and the Arya-siddhanta

The works of Aryabhata dealt with mainly mathematics and astronomy. He also worked on the approximation for pi.

Biography

Name

While there is a tendency to misspell his name as "Aryabhatta" by analogy with other names having the “bhatta" suffix, his name is properly spelled Aryabhata: every astronomical text spells his name thus, including Bhramagupta’s references to him "in more than a hundred places by name". Furthermore, in most instances "Aryabhatta" does not fit the meter either.

Time and place of birth

Aryabhata mentions in the Aryabhatiya that it was composed 3,630 years into the Kali Yuga when he was 23 years old. This corresponds to 499 CE, and implies that he was born in 476.

Aryabhata's birthplace is uncertain, but it may have been in the area known in ancient texts as Ashmaka India which may have been Maharashtra or Dhaka.

Education

It is fairly certain that, at some point, he went to Kusumapura for advanced studies and lived there for some time. A verse mentions that Aryabhata was the head of an institution (kulapati) at Kusumapura, and, because the University of Nalanda was in Pataliputra at the time and had an astronomical observatory, it is speculated that Aryabhata might have been the head of the Nalanda university as well. Aryabhata is also reputed to have set up an observatory at the Sun temple in Taregana, Bihar.

Aryabhata mentions "Lanka" on several occasions in the Aryabhatiya, but his "Lanka" is an abstraction, standing for a point on the equator at the same longitude as his Ujjayini.

Works

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 coversalgebra , plane trignometry, and spherical trignometry..

The Arya-siddhanta, a lot work on astronomical computations, is known through the writings of Aryabhata's contemporary, Varahamihira, and later mathematicians and commentators,. 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.

Aryabhatiya

Direct details of Aryabhata's work are known only from the Aryabhatiya. The name "Aryabhatiya" is due to later commentators. Aryabhata himself may not have given it a name. His disciple Bhaskara 1 calls it Ashmakatantra (or the treatise from the Ashmaka). It is also occasionally referred to as Arya-shatas-aShTa (literally, Aryabhata's 108), because there are 108 verses in the text. It is written in the very terse style typical of sutra literature, in which each line is an aid to memory for a complex system. Thus, the explication of meaning is due to commentators. The text consists of the 108 verses and 13 introductory verses, and is divided into four pādas or chapters:

The Aryabhatiya presented a number of innovations in mathematics and astronomy in verse form, which were influential for many centuries. The extreme brevity of the text was elaborated in commentaries by his disciple Bhaskara I (Bhashya, c. 600 CE)