Āryabhaṭa

Born 476 CE
Kusumapura (Pataliputra) (present day Patna)
Died 550 CE
Residence India

Academic background
Influences Surya Siddhanta
Academic work
Era Gupta era
Main interests Mathematics, Astronomy
Notable works Āryabhaṭīya, Arya-siddhanta
Notable ideas Explanation of lunar eclipseand solar
eclipse, rotation of Earth on its axi, reflection of
light by moon, sinusoidal functions, solution of
single variable quadrati equation, value of π
correct to 4 decimal places, diameter of Earth,
calculation of the length of sidereal year

Influenced Lalla, Bhaskarz I, Brahmagupta, Varahamihira

Aryabhata (LAST: Āryabhaṭa) or Aryabhata I (476–550 C)was
the first of the major mathematician-astronomers from the
classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. His
works include the Āryabhaṭīya(499 CE, when he was 23 years
old) and the Arya-siddhanta.

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, a lost work on astronomical computations, is
known through the writings of Aryabhata's contemporary, Varahamihira,
and later mathematicians and commentators,
including Brahmagupta and Bhaskara I. This work appears to be 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.
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, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī.
Biography
Name
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, including Brahmagupta's references to him "in more than a
hundred places by name".Furthermore, in most instances "Aryabhatta"
would not fit the meter either.

Time and place of 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. Aryabhata called himself a
native of Kusumapura or Pataliputra (present day Patnz, Bihar).

Other hypothesis
Bhāskara I describes Aryabhata as āśmakīya, "one belonging to
the Aśmaka country." During the Buddha's time, a branch of the Aśmaka
people settled in the region between the Narmada and Godavari rivers in
central India.It has been claimed that the aśmaka (Sanskrit for "stone")
where Aryabhata originated may be the present day Kodungallur which
was the historical capital city of Thiruvanchikkulam of ancient
Kerala.This is based on the belief that Koṭuṅṅallūr was earlier known as
Koṭum-Kal-l-ūr ("city of hard stones"); however, old records show that
the city was actually Koṭum-kol-ūr ("city of strict governance").
Similarly, the fact that several commentaries on the Aryabhatiya have
come from Kerala has been used to suggest that it was Aryabhata's main
place of life and activity; however, many commentaries have come from
outside Kerala, and the Aryasiddhanta was completely unknown in
Kerala. K. Chandra Hari has argued for the Kerala hypothesis on the
basis of astronomical evidence. 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.
Education
It is fairly certain that, at some point, he went to Kusumapura for
advanced studies and lived there for some time.Both Hindu and
Buddhist tradition, as well as Bhāskara I (CE 629), identify Kusumapura
as Pāṭaliputra, modern Patna.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.Aryabhata is also
reputed to have set up an observatory at the Sun temple in Taregana,
Bihar.

Aryabhatiya
Main article: 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 pādas or chapters:
1. Gitikapada: (13 verses): large units of time—
kalpa, manvantra, and yuga—which 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 (kṣetra
vyāvahāra), arithmetic and geometric progressions, gnomon /
shadows (shanku-chhAyA), simple, quadratic, simultaneous,
and indeterminate equations (kuṭṭaka).
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).
 Mathematics
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 argues that knowledge of zero was implicit in
Aryabhata's place-value system as a place holder for the powers
of ten with null coefficients.
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.
Approximation of π
Aryabhata worked on the approximation for pi (π), and may have come to
the conclusion that π is irrational. In the second part of
the Aryabhatiyam (gaṇitapāda 10), he writes:
caturadhikaṃ śatamaṣṭaguṇaṃ dvāṣaṣṭistathā sahasrāṇām
ayutadvayaviṣkambhasyāsanno vṛttapariṇāhaḥ.
"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."

Algebra
In Aryabhatiya, Aryabhata provided elegant results for the summation
of series of squares and cubes:
Trigonometry
In Ganitapada 6, Aryabhata gives the area of a triangle as
tribhujasya phalaśarīraṃ samadalakoṭī bhujārdhasaṃvargaḥ
that translates to: "for a triangle, the result of a perpendicular
with the half-side is the area."
Aryabhata discussed the concept of sinein his work by the name
of ardha-jya, which literally 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 jaib, meaning
"pocket" or "fold (in a garment)". (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 jaib with its Latin counterpart, sinus, which
means "cove" or "bay"; thence comes the English word sine.

Indeterminate equations
A problem of great interest to Indian mathematicians since
ancient times has been to find integer solutions to Diophantine
equations that have the form ax + by = c. (This problem was also
studied in ancient Chinese mathematics, and its solution is
usually referred to as the Chinese remainder theorem.) This is an
example from Bhāskara'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, elaborated by Bhaskara
in 621 CE, is called the kuṭṭaka (कुट्टक) method. Kuṭṭaka means
"pulverizing" or "breaking into small pieces", and the method involves a
recursive algorithm for writing the original factors in smaller numbers.
This algorithm became the standard method for solving first-order
diophantine equations in Indian mathematics, and initially the whole
subject of algebra was called kuṭṭaka-gaṇita or simply kuṭṭaka.

Astronomy
Aryabhata's system of astronomy was called the audAyaka
system, in which days are reckoned from uday, dawn at lanka or
"equator". Some of his later writings on astronomy, which
apparently proposed a second model (or ardha-rAtrikA,
midnight) are lost but can be partly reconstructed from the
discussion in Brahmagupta's Khandakhadyaka. In some texts, he
seems to ascribe the apparent motions of the heavens to
the Earth's rotation. He may have believed that the planet's orbits
as elliptical rather than circular.
Motions of the solar system
Aryabhata correctly insisted 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 then-prevailing view, that
the sky rotated. This is indicated in the first chapter of
the Aryabhatiya, where he gives the number of rotations of the earth in
a yuga, and made more explicit in his gola chapter:
In the same way that someone in a boat going forward sees an
unmoving [object] going backward, so [someone] on the equator sees
the unmoving stars going uniformly westward. The cause of rising and
setting [is that] the sphere of the stars together with the planets
[apparently?] turns due west at the equator, constantly pushed by
the cosmic wind.
Aryabhata described a geocentric model of the solar system, in which
the Sun and Moon are each carried by epicycles. They in turn revolve
around the Earth. In this model, which is also found in
the Paitāmahasiddhānta (c. CE 425), the motions of the planets are
each governed by two epicycles, a smaller manda (slow) and a
larger śīghra (fast). The order of the planets in terms of distance from
earth is taken as: the Moon, Mercury, Venus,
the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the asterisms."
The positions and periods of the planets was calculated relative to
uniformly moving points. In the case of Mercury and Venus, they
move around the Earth at the same mean speed as the Sun. In the case
of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, they move around the Earth at specific
speeds, representing each planet's motion through the zodiac. Most
historians of astronomy consider that this two-epicycle model reflects
elements of pre-Ptolemaic Greek astronomy.Another element in
Aryabhata's model, the śīghrocca, the basic planetary period in
relation to the Sun, is seen by some historians as a sign of an
underlying heliocentric model.
Statue of Aryabhata on the grounds of IUCAA, Pune.

India's first satellite named after Aryabhata