Atrybhata

Aryabhata
The Great Indian Mathematician

Sumitted by:
Suyodh Vijayan
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Aryabhata
Aryabhata (476–550 CE) was the first in the line of great mathematician-
astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian
astronomy. Aryabhatta was born in Patliputra in Magadha, modern Patna in
Bihar. Many are of the view that he was born in the south of India especially
Kerala and lived in Magadha at the time of the Gupta rulers; time which is
known as the golden age of India. There is no evidence that he was born
outside Patliputra and traveled to Magadha, the centre of education and
learning for his studies where he even set up a coaching centre. His first name
"Arya" is hardly a south Indian name while "Bhatt" (or Bhatta) is a typical north
Indian name even found today specially among the "Bania" (or trader)
community.

Whatever this origin, it cannot be argued that he lived in Patliputra where he

wrote his famous treatise the "Aryabhatta-siddhanta" but more famously the
"Aryabhatiya", the only work to have survived. It contains mathematical and astronomical theories that
have been revealed to be quite accurate in modern mathematics. For instance he wrote that if 4 is added
to 100 and then multiplied by 8 then added to 62,000 then divided by 20,000 the answer will be equal to
the circumference of a circle of diameter twenty thousand. This calculates to 3.1416 close to the actual
value Pi (3.14159). But his greatest contribution has to be zero. His other works include algebra,
arithmetic, trigonometry, quadratic equations and the sine table.

He already knew that the earth spins on its axis, the earth moves round the sun and the moon rotates
round the earth. He talks about the position of the planets in relation to its movement around the sun. He
refers to the light of the planets and the moon as reflection from the sun. He goes as far as to explain the
eclipse of the moon and the sun, day and night, the contours of the earth, the length of the year exactly as
365 days.
He even computed the circumference of the earth as 24835 miles which is close to modern day
calculation of 24900 miles.

This remarkable man was a genius and continues to baffle many mathematicians of today. His works was
then later adopted by the Greeks and then the Arabs.

Biography
Birth
Aryabhata mentions in the Aryabhatiya that it was composed 3,600 years into the Kali Yuga, when he
was 23 years old. This corresponds to 499 CE, and implies that he was born in 476 CE.

Aryabhata provides no information about his place of birth. The only information comes from Bhāskara I,
who describes Aryabhata as āśmakīya, "one belonging to the aśmaka country." It is widely attested that,
during the Buddha's time, a branch of the Aśmaka people settled in the region between the Narmada and
Godavari rivers in central India, today the South Gujarat–North Maharashtra region. Aryabhata is believed
to have been born there. However, early Buddhist texts describe Ashmaka as being further south, in
dakshinapath or the Deccan, while other texts describe the Ashmakas as having fought Alexander, which
would put them further north.

Other hypotheses
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It was suggested that Aryabhata may have been from Kerala, but K. V. Sarma, an authority on Kerala's
astronomical tradition, disagreed and pointed out several errors in this hypothesis.

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 covers arithmetic, algebra, plane trigonometry, and spherical trigonometry. It also contains
continued fractions, quadratic equations, sums-of-power series, and a table of sines.

It is fairly certain that, at some point, he went to Kusumapura for advanced studies and that he lived there
for some time. Both Hindu and Buddhist tradition, as well as Bhāskara I (CE 629), identify Kusumapura as
Pāṭaliputra, modern Patna. A verse mentions that Aryabhata was the head of an institution (kulapa) 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.

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.

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 I 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, ca. 600 CE) and by Nilakantha Somayaji in his Aryabhatiya Bhasya, (1465
CE).

Mathematics
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Place value system and zero

The place-value system, first seen in the 3rd century Bakhshali Manuscript, was clearly in place in his
work. While he did not use a symbol for zero, the French mathematician Georges Ifrah argues that
knowledge of zero was implicit in Aryabhata's place-value system as a place holder for the powers of ten
with null coefficients

However, Aryabhata did not use the Brahmi numerals. Continuing the Sanskritic tradition from Vedic
times, he used letters of the alphabet to denote numbers, expressing quantities, such as the table of sines
in a mnemonic form.

Approximation of pi ( π )

Aryabhata worked on the approximation for pi ( π ), and may have come to the conclusion that π is
irrational. In the second part of the Aryabhatiyam he writes:
"Add four to 100, multiply by eight, and then add 62,000. By this rule the circumference of a circle with a
diameter of 20,000 can be approached."

This implies that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is

((4+ 100) ×8+ 62000) /20000=62832/20000=3.1416 , which is accurate to five significant figures.

It is speculated that Aryabhata used the word āsanna (approaching), to mean that not only is this an
approximation but that the value is incommensurable (or irrational). If this is correct, it is quite a
sophisticated insight, because the irrationality of pi was proved in Europe only in 1761 by Lambert.

After Aryabhatiya was translated into Arabic (ca. 820 CE) this approximation was mentioned in Al-
Khwarizmi's book on algebra.

Mensuration and trigonometry

In Ganitapada 6, Aryabhata gives the area of a triangle as

tribhujasya phalashariram samadalakoti bhujardhasamvargah

that translates to: "for a triangle, the result of a perpendicular with the half-side is the area."

Aryabhata discussed the concept of sine in his work by the name of ardha-jya. Literally, it means "half-
chord". For simplicity, people started calling it jya. When Arabic writers translated his works from Sanskrit
into Arabic, they referred it as jiba. However, in Arabic writings, vowels are omitted, and it was
abbreviated as jb. Later writers substituted it with jiab, meaning "cove" or "bay." (In Arabic, jiba is a
meaningless word.) Later in the 12th century, when Gherardo of Cremona translated these writings from
Arabic into Latin, he replaced the Arabic jiab with its Latin counterpart, sinus, which means "cove" or
"bay". And after that, the sinus became sine in English.

Algebra
In Aryabhatiya Aryabhata provided elegant results for the summation of series of squares and cubes:
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Astronomy
Aryabhata's system of astronomy was called the audAyaka system, in which days are reckoned from
uday, dawn at lanka or "equator". Some of his later writings on astronomy, which apparently proposed a
second model (or ardha-rAtrikA, midnight) are lost but can be partly reconstructed from the discussion in
Brahmagupta's khanDakhAdyaka. In some texts, he seems to ascribe the apparent motions of the
heavens to the Earth's rotation. He also treated the planet's orbits as elliptical rather than circular.

Legacy
Aryabhata's work was of great influence in the Indian astronomical tradition and influenced several
neighbouring cultures through translations. The Arabic translation during the Islamic Golden Age (ca. 820
CE), was particularly influential. Some of his results are cited by Al-Khwarizmi and in the 10th century Al-
Biruni stated that Aryabhata's followers believed that the Earth rotated on its axis.

His definitions of sine (jya), cosine (kojya), versine (utkrama-jya), and inverse sine (otkram jya) influenced
the birth of trigonometry. He was also the first to specify sine and versine (1 − cos x) tables, in 3.75°
intervals from 0° to 90°, to an accuracy of 4 decimal places.

In fact, modern names "sine" and "cosine" are mistranscriptions of the words jya and kojya as introduced
by Aryabhata. As mentioned, they were translated as jiba and kojiba in Arabic and then misunderstood by
Gerard of Cremona while translating an Arabic geometry text to Latin. He assumed that jiba was the
Arabic word jaib, which means "fold in a garment", L. sinus (c.1150).

Aryabhata's astronomical calculation methods were also very influential. Along with the trigonometric
tables, they came to be widely used in the Islamic world and used to compute many Arabic astronomical
tables (zijes). In particular, the astronomical tables in the work of the Arabic Spain scientist Al-Zarqali
(11th century) were translated into Latin as the Tables of Toledo (12th c.) and remained the most
accurate ephemeris used in Europe for centuries.

Calendric calculations devised by Aryabhata and his followers have been in continuous use in India for
the practical purposes of fixing the Panchangam (the Hindu calendar). In the Islamic world, they formed
the basis of the Jalali calendar introduced in 1073 CE by a group of astronomers including Omar
Khayyam, versions of which (modified in 1925) are the national calendars in use in Iran and Afghanistan
today. The dates of the Jalali calendar are based on actual solar transit, as in Aryabhata and earlier
Siddhanta calendars. This type of calendar requires an ephemeris for calculating dates. Although dates
were difficult to compute, seasonal errors were less in the Jalali calendar than in the Gregorian calendar.

India's first satellite Aryabhata and the lunar crater Aryabhata are named in his honour. An Institute for
conducting research in astronomy, astrophysics and atmospheric sciences is the Aryabhatta Research
Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) near Nainital, India. The inter-school Aryabhata Maths
Competition is also named after him, as is Bacillus aryabhata, a species of bacteria discovered by ISRO
scientists in 2009.