ARYABHATTA

MATHEMATICIAN AND ASTRONOMER

(476 – 550 A. D.)

If only we lived in the later part of the 5^th 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 21^st 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.

That boy was Aryabhatta, born in the year 476 A. D., destined to be a great mathematician-astronomer. He was soon appointed as the head of Nalanda University by the then Gupta ruler Buddhagupta. Later when his book ‘Aryabahtiya’ was translated into Latin in the 13^th century, floodgates were opened to the European mathematicians towards many unknown mathematical formulae.

           The number system we use today, known as Hindu-Arabic number system, was developed by Indian mathematicians and spread around the world by Arabs. Aryabhatta states that system as ‘Stanam Stanam Dasa Gunam’ which in English means ‘Place to Place Ten Times in Value’. He devised a unique method to represent large unwieldy numbers such as billions in simple words of poetry.

          Aryabhatta calculated the value of pi, as 3.1416, correct to five digits. Aryabhatta gave the area of triangle and was the first mathematician to give what later came to be called the table of Sines. His method to find a solution to indeterminate equations such as ‘ax – by = c’ is also recognized the world over.

            Aryabhatta propounded the theory that Earth is round and that it rotates on its own axis, creating day and night. He confirmed that the moon shines because of sunlight. He recognized that solar and lunar eclipses occurred because of the shadows cast by the earth and the moon and not because Rahu and Ketu gobbled the sun the moon, as some people believe even now. He calculated the time for the rotation of the Earth with reference to fixed stars, (side real rotation) as 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds (the modern value is 23:56:4.091), and the length of the side real year as 365 days 6 hours 12 minutes 30 seconds (an error of 3 minutes 20 seconds). Aryabhatta’s computation of the ‘’earth’s circumference was 24,835 miles. Actual figure is 24,902 miles and his error was merely 0.2%.

           Is it not astonishing that Aryabhatta as well as other Indian astronomers made near-perfect prediction and calculations without the aid of the telescope and watching the night sky with naked eye?

           He also propounded the Heliocentric theory of gravitation, much before Copernicus gave his theory. Many ancient Indian Astronomers had also referred to the concept of Heliocentricsm. Aryabhatta had suggested it in his treatise ‘Aryabhatiya’.

            Aryabhatta hints at the relativity of motion in a passage in his book,

            “Just as man in boat sees the trees on the bank move in the opposite direction, so an observer on the equator sees the stationary stars as moving precisely towards the west”.

           His other treatise, ‘Aryabhatta Siddhanta’, is still the basis for making astronomical calculations, and for fixing up auspicious times for various rituals and preparation of panachangs (Hindu calendars).

             He left his mortal coil around 550 A.D..  A lunar crater was named Aryabhatta in his honour.

                               

India’s first satellite was named Aryabhatta as a tribute to his contributions to astronomy and mathematics. Weighing 360 kg, it was put in orbit on 19^th April, 1975.