Aryabhata

Lore & Background

He called himself a native of Kusumapura or Pataliputra (near present-day Patna, Bihar). Bhāskara I describes him as āśmakīya, 'one belonging to the Aśmaka country,' a region between the Narmada and Godavari rivers. Some have claimed his origin was Kodungallur in Kerala, but old records show the city was known as Koṭum-kol-ūr, and the Kerala hypothesis is debated. Aryabhata is also reputed to have set up an observatory at the Sun temple in Taregana, Bihar.

Reader's Guide

Aryabhata's surviving work, the Aryabhatiya, is a compendium of mathematics and astronomy written in terse verse form, covering arithmetic, algebra, plane and spherical trigonometry, continued fractions, quadratic equations, sums-of-power series, and a table of sines. He described the relativity of motion, stating that stationary stars appear to move westward just as stationary objects on shore seem to move backward to a man in a moving boat. His lost work, the Arya-siddhanta, is known through later commentators and described astronomical instruments. The place-value system was implicit in his work, though he used alphabetic numerals rather than Brahmi numerals. His contributions influenced Indian mathematics and astronomy for centuries, with commentaries by Bhaskara I and Nilakantha Somayaji.

Did You Know?

• He called himself a native of Kusumapura or Pataliputra, near present-day Patna, Bihar.
• He described the relativity of motion using the analogy of a man in a boat seeing stationary objects as moving backward.