Aryabhata Quotes

There may well be other crucial names which have now been forgotten, for less than a tenth of all surviving Sanskrit scientific manuscripts have yet been studied and published; even the work of Aryabhata was little known before it was rediscovered, and its importance grasped, as late as the 1950s.38

The Aryabhatiya covers arithmetic, squares, cubes, square roots, cube roots, triangles, the properties of a circle, algebra, fractions, quadratic equations and sines, and it utilises the decimal system with place value. It contains a very close approximation of the value of pi – 3.1416 – and perfected the ‘rule of three’ still used to compute ratios. It also deals with spherical trigonometry. The ease of making calculations using this system had direct implications for astronomy and allowed Aryabhata to calculate the movements of the planet, eclipses, the size of the earth and, astonishingly, the exact length of the solar year to an accuracy of seven decimal points.

Aryabhata correctly concluded, a full thousand years before Copernicus and Galileo, that the earth rotates about its axis daily, and that the apparent movement of the stars is a relative motion caused by the rotation of the earth, contrary to the prevailing view that it was the sky that rotated. What he got wrong was believing that the sun revolved around the earth rather than the other way round.

The second step in the full comprehension of the idea of zero took place with Brahmagupta, author of the Sindhind that would find its way to Abbasid Baghdad. He made it his job to continue and correct the work of Aryabhata about one hundred years after the latter’s death. Brahmagupta was to treat the zero symbol as a number just like the other nine, rather than merely as a void or an absence.33 This meant developing rules for doing arithmetic using this additional symbol along with the other nine.

This was in turn related to the Golden Ratio, which Fibonacci realised was something which kept reappearing in nature: the spiralling of the chambers of the nautilus shell, for example, obeys this ratio.59 Although Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci contains the earliest known description of the sequence outside India, the sequence had been described by Aryabhata as early as the sixth century.