Mathematics
476 to 550 CE, Kusumapura (Pataliputra), India
A whole mathematics and astronomy in 121 verses - the value of pi, the first sine table, and a turning earth.
Start learning Aryabhata →How a 23-year-old compressed the mathematics and astronomy of an age into one hundred and twenty-one terse Sanskrit verses - the aphoristic sutra form, and the alphabetic number notation Aryabhata invented to pack vast…
Aryabhata’s strikingly accurate value of pi - 3.1416, correct to four places - and the single word asanna , ‘approaching,’ with which he may have signalled that the true ratio can never be exactly caug…
Aryabhata’s table of sine-differences - the first true sine table in history - and the strange journey of his word jya , the half-chord, which travelled through Arabic mistransliteration to become the ‘sine&…
Aryabhata’s most daring claim - that the whole sky wheels westward each night not because the heavens turn but because the earth spins on its axis - argued with a homely image of a boat, a thousand years before Co…
Aryabhata the calculator of the real heavens - explaining eclipses by the plain geometry of shadows rather than the swallowing demons of myth, and inventing the kuttaka or ‘pulverizer,’ a general method for…
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