Ancient Indian mathematics and astronomy
The numbers you write every day — 0 to 9, with place value — came from India. Indian mathematicians gave the world rules for zero, calculated π to great precision and discovered infinite series centuries before Europe. Meet the minds behind them.
The verse
Geometry at the fire altar
[Historical scholarship]
The Shulba Sutras ("rules of the cord"), appendices to the Vedic ritual texts — the oldest, Baudhayana's, dated by most scholars to roughly 800–500 BCE — give instructions for building fire altars of exact shapes and areas. They state the relationship between the sides and diagonal of a rectangle (what we call Pythagoras's theorem), give methods to turn a square into a circle of nearly equal area, and approximate √2 as 1.4142156 — correct to five decimal places.
The gift of zero
[Historical scholarship]
The decimal place-value system with a symbol for zero — the system now used everywhere — was developed in India in the early centuries CE and reached Europe through Arab scholars, which is why Europeans called the digits "Arabic numerals". In 628 CE Brahmagupta did something no one had done before: he treated zero as a number in its own right, with rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying with it. And a battered birch-bark manuscript found in a field in 1881 may hold one of its oldest written forms…
The journey continues for members
- The Bakhshali manuscript
- Aryabhata (476–550 CE)
- Brahmagupta and Bhaskara
- The Kerala school — infinite series
- Patterns in poetry
- Astronomy and the calendar
- Facts and exaggerations
- What we can learn
Sources
- Aryabhatiya — Aryabhata (499 CE)
- Brahmasphutasiddhanta — Brahmagupta (628 CE)
- Lilavati and Siddhanta Shiromani — Bhaskara II
- Yuktibhasha — Jyeshthadeva
- Kim Plofker — Mathematics in India (2009)
- Bodleian Libraries — Bakhshali manuscript dating (2017)