Mathematician Aryabhata

The Indians were the first to use the decimal system. The famous mathematician Aryabhata (A.D. 476-500) was acquainted with it. The Chinese learnt this system from the Buddhist missionaries, and the Western world borrowed it from the Arab? When they came in contact with India. Zero was discovered by the Indians in about the second century B.C.

From the very beginning the Indian

mathematicians considered zero as a separate numeral, and it was used in this

sense in sums of arithmetic. In Arabia the earliest use of zero appears in A.D:

873. The Arabs learnt and adopted it from India and spread it in Europe. So far

as algebra is concerned both the Indians and the Greeks contributed to it, but

m Western Europe its knowledge was borrowed not from Greece but from the Arabs

who had acquired it from India.

In the second century B.C. Apastamba

produced a practical geometry for the construction of altars at which the kings

could offer sacrifices. It describes acute angle, obtuse angle, right angle.

Aryabhata formulated the rule for finding the area of a triangle, which led to

the origin of trigonometry. The most famous work of this time is the

Suryasiddhanta, the like of which is not found in contemporary ancient East

The most renowned scholars of astronomy

were Aryabhata and Varahamihira Aryabhata belonged to the fifth century, and

Varahamihira to the sixth, Aryabhata calculated the position of the planets

according to the Babylonian method. He discovered the cause of lunar and solar

eclipses.

Circumference of the earth

The circumference of the earth which he measured on the basis of speculation is considered to be correct even now. He pointed out that the sun is stationary and the earth rotates. The book of Aryabhata is called the Aryabhatiya.

Varahamihira’s well-known work is called

the Brihatsamhita, which belongs to the sixth century A D. Varahamihira stated

that the moon rotates round the earth and the earth rotates round the sun. He

utilized several Greek, works to explain the movement of the planets and some

other astronomical problems. Although the Greek knowledge influenced Indian

astronomy, there is no doubt that the Indians pursued the subject further and

made use of it in their observations of the planets.

In the applied field Indian craftsmen con: tribute

much to the progress of chemistry. The Indian dyers invented lasting colors and

they also discovered the blue color. It has been already stated how the Indian

smiths were the first in the world to manufacture steel.