Short Biography on Aryabhatta
Our country has been a pioneer in many fields from art, culture to science. When the rest of the world wasn’t even aware of many concepts, our sages invented and established quite a few facts. Aryabhatta was one such great Indian mathematician.
Aryabhatta was born in Kerala in 476. He studied at Nalanda University. In 499 BC he wrote a book Aryabhatiya, which gives Hindu mathematics of that time. Subjects like astronomy, spherical trigonometry, arithmetic, algebra, and plane trigonometry are dealt with in this book.
Aryabhatta also worked out formulae for the areas of a triangle and a circle. He was well appreciated. The Maurya ruler Buddhagupta appointed him as the head of the University. Aryabhatta was the first one to put forward the theory that our Earth is round and day and night are created because it rotates around its own axis.
At that time it was believed that Rahu swallows the Sun or the Moon, thus creating solar or lunar eclipses. But Aryabhatta cleared the misconception and declared that the eclipses are caused by the shadows cast by the Earth and the Moon. He also stated that the moon is dark and it shines only because of the sunlight.
However, he also gave some wrong conclusions like the formulae for the volumes of a sphere and a pyramid. He also wrongly claimed that the Earth is the center of the Universe.
He was a great mathematician, the first one to give the ‘tables of sines’. He was the one who derived the value of ‘pi’ as 3.1416 and claimed that it was an approximation.
Our first Indian satellite was named after him as Aryabhatta.
