Aryabhatta: The Indian Mathematician
71ARYABHATTA, or, as written by the Arabs, ARJABAHR, a celebrated Hindu mathematician, and the earliest known author on Algebra, is now generally believed to have lived about the beginning of our era. Nothing, however, has yet appeared that can give us the slightest information as to the place of his birth, or the time when he lived; nor is there, as far as we know, any tradition or record extent from which we can collect any of the circumstances of his life; even his period is still a matter of dispute. We must, therefore, content ourselves with whatever notices we find of Aryabhatta and his system in the various writers on astronomy and other mathematical sciences whose authority is established and cannot be called into doubt.
Aryabhatta is the first writer on astronomy to whom the Hindus do not allow the honour of a divine inspiration. Writers on mathematical science distinctly state that he was the earliest uninspired and a merely human writer on astronomy. This is a notice which sufficiently proves his being an historical character.
The chief doctrines which Aryabhatta (Aarya-Bhatt) professed were the following:
He affirmed the diurnal revolution of the earth on its axis; an assertion which is fully borne out by a quotation from one of his works, in a commentary on the "Brahmasphut'a-Siddhanta" of Brahmagupta by Prithudakaswami: "The Earth making a revolution produces a daily rising and setting of the stars and planets". At the same time he thought that this revolving of the earth was produced through the agency of a peculiar current of aerial fluid, or spiritus vector ("wind"), to which he assigned a distance of 150 yojanas (114 miles) from the surface of the earth. In opposition to the generally received opinion, he maintained that the moon, the primary planets, and the stars had no light of their own, and were only illumined by the sun; he consequently knew the true cause of solar and lunar eclipses.
Aryabhatta also ascribed to the epicycles, by which the motion of a planet is represented, a form varying from the circle and nearly elliptic. Moreover, he recognized a motion of the nodes and asides of all primary planets, as well as of the moon, and noticed the motion of the equinoctial and solstitial points, which he restricted, however, to an oscillation within the limits of twenty- four degrees, at the rate of one libration in seventy years. The length of AryabhatYa's sidereal year was 356 days 6 hours 12 minutes and 30 seconds. Aryabhatta stated the diameter of the earth at 1050 yojanas and its circumference at 3300 yojanas (25,080 miles). Hence it appears that he held the proportion of the diameter to the periphery of a circle to be seven to twenty-two, which is a nearer approximation than that of Brahmagupta and S'ridhara, who came after him.
The astronomical sects, of which Arabhatta is the reputed founder, were distinguished by the name of Audayakas, from Udaya, " rising;" implying that they fixed the beginning of the planetary motions on the meridian of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) at sun-rise, in opposition to the Arddharatrikas, who began the great astronomical cycle at midnight. Aryabhatta is the author of the " Aryasht'- as'ata" (eight hundred couplets in the Arya metre) and the "Das'agitika" (ten stanzas). The "Laghwarya-Siddhanta" is also ascribed to him: but, unfortunately, none of these works have yet been discovered; and we know them only through the numerous quotations from them, with which the works of subsequent writers abound. For an exposition of his numerical system and algebraic doctrine we refer to the article by another renowned scientist called BHASKARA.
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Aryabhata is also known as Aryabhata I to distinguish him from the later mathematician of the same name who lived about 400 years later. Al-Biruni has not helped in understanding Aryabhata's life, for he seemed to believe that there were two different mathematicians called Aryabhata living at the same time. He therefore created a confusion of two different Aryabhatas which was not clarified until 1926 when B Datta showed that al-Biruni's two Aryabhatas were one and the same person.
We know the year of Aryabhata's birth since he tells us that he was twenty-three years of age when he wrote Aryabhatiya which he finished in 499. We have given Kusumapura, thought to be close to Pataliputra (which was refounded as Patna in Bihar in 1541), as the place of Aryabhata's birth but this is far from certain, as is even the location of Kusumapura itself. As Parameswaran writes in [26]:-
... no final verdict can be given regarding the locations of Asmakajanapada and Kusumapura.
We do 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. In [8] 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 I who was a later commentator on the Aryabhatiya.
We should note that Kusumapura became one of the two major mathematical centres 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 the time of Aryabhata, 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.
As to the texts written by Aryabhata only one has survived. However Jha claims in [21] that:-
... Aryabhata was an author of at least three astronomical texts and wrote some free stanzas as well.
The surviving text is Aryabhata's masterpiece the Aryabhatiya which is a small astronomical treatise 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.
There is a difficulty with this layout which is discussed in detail by van der Waerden in [35]. Van der Waerden suggests that in fact the 10 verse Introduction was written later than the other three sections. One reason for believing that the two parts were not intended as a whole is that the first section has a different meter to the remaining three sections. However, the problems do not stop there. We said that the first section had ten verses and indeed Aryabhata titles the section Set of ten giti stanzas. But it in fact contains eleven giti stanzas and two arya stanzas. Van der Waerden suggests that three verses have been added and he identifies a small number of verses in the remaining sections which he argues have also been added by a member of Aryabhata's school at Kusumapura.
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. Let us examine some of these in a little more detail.
First we look at the system for representing numbers which Aryabhata invented and used in the Aryabhatiya. It consists of giving numerical values to the 33 consonants of the Indian alphabet to represent 1, 2, 3, ... , 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100. The higher numbers are denoted by these consonants followed by a vowel to obtain 100, 10000, .... In fact the system allows numbers up to 1018to be represented with an alphabetical notation. Ifrah in [3] argues that Aryabhata was also familiar with numeral symbols and the place-value system. He writes in [3]:-
... it is extremely likely that Aryabhata knew the sign for zero and the numerals of the place value system. This supposition is based on the following two facts: first, the invention of his alphabetical counting system would have been impossible without zero or the place-value system; secondly, he carries out calculations on square and cubic roots which are impossible if the numbers in question are not written according to the place-value system and zero.
Next we look briefly at some algebra contained in the Aryabhatiya. This work is the first we are aware of which examines integer solutions to equations of the form by = ax + c and by = ax - c, where a, b, c are integers. The problem arose from studying the problem in astronomy of determining the periods of the planets. Aryabhata uses the kuttaka method to solve problems of this type. The word kuttaka means "to pulverise" and the method consisted of breaking the problem down into new problems where the coefficients became smaller and smaller with each step. The method here is essentially the use of the Euclidean algorithm to find the highest common factor of a and b but is also related to continued fractions.
Aryabhata gave an accurate approximation for ?. 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 ? = 62832/20000 = 3.1416 which is a surprisingly accurate value. In fact ? = 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 ? but prefers to use ?10 = 3.1622 in practice. Aryabhata does not explain how he found this accurate value but, for example, Ahmad [5] considers this value as an approximation to half the perimeter of a regular polygon of 256 sides inscribed in the unit circle. However, in [9] Bruins shows that this result cannot be obtained from the doubling of the number of sides. Another interesting paper discussing this accurate value of ? by Aryabhata is [22] where Jha writes:-
Aryabhata I's value of ? is a very close approximation to the modern value and the most accurate among those of the ancients. There are reasons to believe that Aryabhata devised a particular method for finding this value. It is shown with sufficient grounds that Aryabhata himself used it, and several later Indian mathematicians and even the Arabs adopted it. The conjecture that Aryabhata's value of ? is of Greek origin is critically examined and is found to be without foundation. Aryabhata discovered this value independently and also realised that ? is an irrational number. He had the Indian background, no doubt, but excelled all his predecessors in evaluating ?. Thus the credit of discovering this exact value of ? may be ascribed to the celebrated mathematician, Aryabhata I.
We now look at the trigonometry contained in Aryabhata's treatise. He gave a table of sines calculating the approximate values at intervals of 90°/24 = 3° 45'. In order to do this he used a formula for sin(n+1)x - sin nx in terms of sin nx and sin (n-1)x. He also introduced the versine (versin = 1 - cosine) into trigonometry.
Aman deep Garg says:
2 years ago
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