MATHEMATICIAN AND ASTRONOMER
(476 – 550 A. D.)
If only we lived in the later part of the 5th
century A.D., we could have had a glimpse of a brilliant young boy with a halo
of genius around him walking from a remote village, Muziris in the deep South
India to up north at Kusumapura. Yes, walk it was, the best available
transport, next to bullock carts or horses, in those days. That village is the
present-day Kodungallour near Trissur, in Kerala and Kusumapura later came to
be known as Pataliputra and now it is called Patna. The western world was still
in deep slumber. That boy had a penchant for study at the international
residential Nalanda University. That walk marked the first steps towards a
Magnum Opus.
On 21st March, 499 A.D., at Khagola,
the famous astronomical observatory of the University of Nalanda, the
university bells were ringing and Vedic chants rending the skies and beyond.
Seating on a high podium, that boy, now 23-year-old, picked up a pen and
started writing on the palm leaf parchments right on dot at the auspicious
moment.
Thus stared a treatise, which came to be the
greatest mathematical manual of all times-‘Aryabhatta’. It dealt with many aspects of mathematics,
like geometry, mensuration, square root, cube root, progression, the areas of
triangles, volumes of sphere and astronomical calculations.