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Aryabhata the Elder (Aryabhata I)

Born 476 CE

alternate dating (2765 CE)

Aryabhata was India's first satellite, named after the great Indian astronomer of the same name. It was launched by the Soviet Union on 19 April 1975 from Kapustin Yar using a Cosmos-3M launch vehicle. Aryabhata was built by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to conduct experiments related to astronomy. The satellite reentered the Earth's atmosphere on 11 February 1992

I have included a few important details about just a few of the most famous ancient Indian mathematicians from past years. To my mind, the most important and most influential of these figures were Aryabhata and Panini.

Aryabhata had an excellent understanding of the Keplerian Universe more than a thousand years before Kepler, while Panini made a remarkable analysis of language, namely Sanskrit, which was not matched for 2,500 years, until the modern Bacchus form, in the 20th century.
Some questions we seek to answer in this essay

1.When did he live ?

2. What script did he use, the premise being that sophisticated calculations like the kind he performed cannot be done without the means of a script

3.Did he (or Panini) develop the place value system and the germ of the numerical notation and if so which one ?


 

Aryabhata wrote Âryabhatiya , finished in 499 CE ( 2741 BCE), which is a summary of Hindu mathematics up to that time, written in verse. It covers astronomy, spherical trigonometry, arithmetic, algebra and plane trigonometry. Aryabhata gives formulas for the areas of a triangle and a circle which are correct, but the formulas for the volumes of a sphere and a pyramid are wrong.


Âryabhatiya also contains continued fractions, quadratic equations, sums of power series and a table of sines. Aryabhata gave an accurate approximation for pi (equivalent to 3.1416) and was one of the first known to use algebra. He also introduced the versine ( versin = 1 - cos ) into trigonometry.  Incidentally both the words Geometry and Trigonometry are etymologically derived from Sanskrit


Aryabhata also wrote the astronomy text Siddhanta which taught that the apparent rotation of the heavens was due to the axial rotation of the Earth. The work is written in 121 stanzas. It gives  quite a remarkable prescient view of the nature of the solar system as we know it today. Unlike Copernicus and Kepler , he did not stand on the shoulders of giants, but was figuratively speaking one of the giants that bestrode the ancient universe


Aryabhata gives the radius of the planetary orbits in terms of the radius of the Earth/Sun orbit as essentially their periods of rotation around the Sun. He believes that the Moon and planets shine by reflected sunlight, incredibly he believes that the orbits of the planets are ellipses. He correctly explains the causes of eclipses of the Sun and the Moon.


His value for the length of the year at 365 days 6 hours 12 minutes 30 seconds is an overestimate since the true value is less than 365 days 6 hours.


References (4 books/articles) References for Aryabhata the Elder
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from Georges Ifrah Universal History of  Numbers


1.Dictionary of Scientific Biography

2.Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica

3.B Datta, Two Aryabhatas of al-Biruni, Bull. Calcutta Math. Soc. 17 (1926), 59-74.

4.H-J Ilgauds, Aryabhata I, in H Wussing and W Arnold, Biographien bedeutender Mathematiker (Berlin, 1983).

TheTheme of the RSA Conference 2006,San Jose,CA, February 2006

Every year, the RSA Conference is built around a different historical theme which highlights a significant use, or misuse, of information security. In 2006, the theme is centered on ancient Vedic mathematics, and a mathematical Sage named Aryabhata.

Modern Codes in Ancient Sutras

In 499 CE, in Kusumapura, capital of the Gupta Empire in classical India, a young mathematician named Aryabhata published an astronomical treatise written in 118 Sanskrit verses. A student of the Vedic mathematics tradition that had slowly emerged in India between 1500 and 900 BC, Aryabhata, only 23, intended merely to give a summary of Vedic mathematics up to his time. But his slender volume, the Aaryabhat.iiya, was to become one of the most brilliant achievements in the history of mathematics, with far-ranging implications in the East and West.

Aryabhata correctly determined the axial rotation of the earth. He inferred that planetary orbits were elliptical, and provided a valid explanation of solar and lunar eclipses. His theory of the relativity of motion predated Einstein’s by 1400 years. And his studies in algebra and trigonometry, which laid the foundations for calculus, influenced European mathematicians 1,000 years later, when his texts were translated into European languages from 8th century Arabic translations of the Sanskrit originals.

Today, the work of information security professionals affects the global business community in ways as profound and far-reaching as the seminal calculations of Aryabhata. Join us at the RSA Conference 2006 to celebrate the mathematical achievements of ancient India, and discover unprecedented approaches to securing your business and applications.

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