Name

His first name "Arya" is not a south Indian name while "Bhatt" (or sometimes Bhatta) is a typical north Indian name. The name is popular even today in India especially among the trader community of north India. While there is a tendency to misspell his name as "Aryabhatta" by analogy with other

names having the "bhatta" suffix, his name is properly spelled Aryabhata: every astronomical text spells his name thus,[1] including Brahmagupta's references to him "in more than a hundred places by name".[2] Furthermore, in most instances "Aryabhatta" does not fit the metre either.[1]

[edit] 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 Bh skara I, who describes Aryabhata as mak ya, "one belonging to the a maka country." It is widely attested that, during the Buddha's time, a branch of the A maka people settled in the region between the Narmada and Godavari rivers in central India, today the South GujaratNorth Maharashtra region. Aryabhata is believed to have been born there.[1][3] 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,

[edit] Work
It is fairly certain that, at some point, he went to Kusumapura for advanced studies and that he lived there for some time.[4] Both Hindu and Buddhist tradition, as well as Bh skara I (CE 629), identify Kusumapura as P aliputra, modern Patna.[1] 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.[1] Aryabhata is also reputed to have set up an observatory at the Sun temple in Taregana, Bihar.[5]

[edit] Other hypotheses

It was suggested that Aryabhata may have been from Tamilnaduu, but K. V. Sarma, an authority on Kerala's astronomical tradition, disagreed[1] and pointed out several errors in this hypothesis.[6] 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.[7]

[edit] 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. The Arya-siddhanta is a lost work on astronomical computations. This work is 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.[3] 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, Ab Rayh n al-B r n .[3]

[edit] 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 p das or chapters: 1. Gitikapada: (13 verses): large units of timekalpa, manvantra, and yugawhich present a cosmology different from earlier texts such as Lagadha's Vedanga Jyotisha (c. 1st century BCE). There is also a table of sines (jya), given in a single verse. The duration of the planetary revolutions during a mahayuga is given as 4.32 million years. 2. Ganitapada (33 verses): covering mensuration (k etra vy vah ra), arithmetic and geometric progressions, gnomon / shadows (shanku-chhAyA), simple, quadratic, simultaneous, and indeterminate equations (kuTTaka) 3. Kalakriyapada (25 verses): different units of time and a method for determining the positions of planets for a given day, calculations concerning the intercalary month (adhikamAsa), kShaya-tithis, and a seven-day week with names for the days of week. 4. Golapada (50 verses): Geometric/trigonometric aspects of the celestial sphere, features of the ecliptic, celestial equator, node, shape of the earth, cause of day and night, rising of zodiacal signs on horizon, etc. In addition, some versions cite a few colophons added at the end, extolling the virtues of the work, etc.

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

[edit] Mathematics
[edit] 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 explains that knowledge of zero was implicit in Aryabhata's place-value system as a place holder for the powers of ten with null coefficients[8] 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.[9]

[edit] Approximation of
Aryabhata worked on the approximation for pi ( ), and may have come to the conclusion that is irrational. In the second part of the Aryabhatiyam (ga itap da 10), he writes: caturadhikam atama agu am dv a istath sahasr m ayutadvayavi kambhasy sanno v ttapari ha . "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."[10] 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 sanna (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.[11] After Aryabhatiya was translated into Arabic (c. 820 CE) this approximation was mentioned in Al-Khwarizmi's book on algebra.[3]

[edit] 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."[12] 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.[13]

[edit] Indeterminate equations

A problem of great interest to Indian mathematicians since ancient times has been to find integer solutions to equations that have the form ax + by = c, a topic that has come to be known as diophantine equations. This is an example from Bh skara's commentary on Aryabhatiya: Find the number which gives 5 as the remainder when divided by 8, 4 as the remainder when divided by 9, and 1 as the remainder when divided by 7 That is, find N = 8x+5 = 9y+4 = 7z+1. It turns out that the smallest value for N is 85. In general, diophantine equations, such as this, can be notoriously difficult. They were discussed extensively in ancient Vedic text Sulba Sutras, whose more ancient parts might date to 800 BCE. Aryabhata's method of solving such problems is called the ku aka ( ) method. Kuttaka means "pulverizing" or "breaking into small pieces", and the method involves a recursive algorithm for writing the original factors in smaller numbers. Today this algorithm, elaborated by Bhaskara in 621 CE, is the standard method for solving first-order diophantine equations and is often referred to as the Aryabhata algorithm.[14] The diophantine equations are of interest in cryptology, and the RSA Conference, 2006, focused on the kuttaka method and earlier work in the Sulbasutras.

[edit] Algebra
In Aryabhatiya Aryabhata provided elegant results for the summation of series of squares and cubes:[15]

and

He also wrote essays on astronomy. For example he was aware that the earth spins on its axis, and that it moves round the sun and the moon rotates round the earth. He discusses about the locations of the planets in relation to its movement around the sun. He refers to the light of the planets and the moon as reflections 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 also calculated the circumference of the earth as 24835 miles which is close to present day calculation of 24,900 miles. This extraordinary man was an intellectual of immense proportions and continues to baffle many mathematicians of today. His working was then later adopted by the Greeks and then the Arabs. If one is to study the history of mathematics, Aryabhatta of Bihar outshines everyone.