Aryabhatta was the first in the line of brilliant mathematician-astronomers of classical India, whose major work was the Aryabhattayium and the Aryabhatta-siddhanta

Aryabhatta has done a notable work and has influenced the development of mathematics and astronomy in India to a great extent. Many commentaries have been written on it

It lead to the establishment of what is known as Aryabhata School. None of the copies of Aryabhatta-Siddhanta is

known to exist today. But a small portion of this, consisting of 34 verses have been quoted by others and these deal with the design and construction of astronomical instrumentsHe also created the Sanskrit numerals.

We know that Aryabhata wrote Aryabhatiya in Kusumapura at the time when Pataliputra was the capital of the Gupta empire and a major centre of learning, but there have been numerous other places proposed by historians as his birthplace. Some conjecture that he was born in south India, perhaps Kerala, Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh, while others conjecture that he was born in the north-east of India, perhaps in Bengal. It is claimed that Aryabhata was born in the Asmaka region of the Vakataka dynasty in South India although the author accepted that he lived most of his life in Kusumapura in the Gupta empire of the north. However, giving Asmaka as Aryabhata's birthplace rests on a comment made by Nilakantha Somayaji in the late 15th century. It is now thought by most historians that Nilakantha confused Aryabhata with Bhaskara who was a later commentator on the Aryabhatiya.

He formulated the process of calculating the motion of planets and the time of eclipses. Aryabhatta was the

first to proclaim the earth was round, rotating on an axis, orbiting the sun and suspended in space. This was around 1,000 years before Copernicus. He was a geometry genius credited with calculating pi to four decimal places, developing the trigonomic sine table and the area of a triangle. Perhaps his most important contribution

was the concept of the zero. Details are found in Shulvasutraaregna (meaning, calculating stars), according to popular belief among people in the region , is perhaps the oldest observatory and laboratory of Aryabhata

.

We should note that Kusumapura became one of the two major mathematical centers of India, the other being Ujjain Both are in the north but

Kusumapura (assuming it . to be close to Pataliputra) is on the Ganges and is the more northerly . Pataliputra, being the capital of the Gupta empire at Aryabhata the time of, was the centre of a communications

network which allowed learning from other parts of the world to reach it easily, and also allowed the mathematical and astronomical advances made by Aryabhata and his school to reach across India and also eventually into the Islamic world The surviving text is Aryabhata's The surviving text is Aryabhata's masterpiece the Aryabhatiya which written in 118 verses

giving a summary of Hindu mathematics up to that time.

Its mathematical section contains 33 verses giving 66 mathematical rules without proof. The Aryabhatiya contains an introduction of 10 verses followed by a section on mathematics ,with, as we just mentioned, 33 verses, then a section of 25 verses on the reckoning of time and planetary models, with the final section of 50 verses being on the sphere and eclipses.

Aryabhata gave an accurate approximation for π. He wrote in the Aryabhatiya the following:-

Add four to one hundred, multiply by eight and then add sixty-two thousand. the result is approximately the circumference of a circle of diameter twenty thousand By this rule the relation of the . circumference to diameter is given.

This gives π = 62832/20000 = 3.1416 which is a surprisingly accurate value. In fact π = 3.14159265 correct to 8 places. If obtaining a value this accurate is surprising, it is perhaps even more surprising that Aryabhata does not use his accurate value for π but prefers to use √10 = 3.1622 in practice. Aryabhata does not explain how he found this accurate value

Aryabhata gives the radius of the planetary orbits in terms of the radius of the Earth/Sun orbit as essentially their periods of rotation around the Sun. He believes that the Moon and planets shine by reflected sunlight, incredibly he believes that the orbits of the planets are ellipses. He correctly explains the causes of eclipses of the Sun and the Moon . The Indian belief up to that time was that eclipses were caused by a demon called Rahu. His value for the length of the year at 365 days 6 hours 12 minutes 30 seconds is an overestimate since the true value is less than 365 days 6 hours.

So for all this reasons we call

Aryabhtta ‘THE FATHER OF MATHEMATICS ’