Indian mathematics

Indian Mathematics

Indian mathematics is a wonderful story of smart thinking from long ago. It started in the Indian subcontinent and grew from around 1200 BCE to the late 1700s. During a special time from 400 CE to 1200 CE, Indian thinkers made big steps in math.

Some great people who helped shape math today were Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara II, Varāhamihira, and Madhava. They studied many parts of math, like zero, negative numbers, arithmetic, and trigonometry.

One of the best gifts from Indian mathematicians is the decimal number system we use now. They were among the first to think of zero as a number. Their ideas traveled to the Middle East, China, and Europe, helping math grow everywhere.

Many old Indian math books were written in Sanskrit. They often began with short poems called sutras to help people remember the rules. The oldest known math book from India is the Bakhshali Manuscript, found near Peshawar in modern-day Pakistan. It likely dates to the 7th century CE.

Later, in the 15th century, mathematicians from the Kerala school in India learned how to expand trigonometric functions into series. They did this long before calculus was created in Europe. Their work was one of the earliest examples of what we now call a power series.

Ancient people in Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and other sites of the Indus Valley civilisation used practical math a very long time ago. They made bricks in a special size ratio of 4:2:1 to help buildings stay strong. They also used a standard system of weights with many different sizes, from very small to very large.

During the Vedic Period, texts like the Yajurvedasaṃhitā- mentioned big numbers up to 10¹². The Satapatha Brahmana had rules for making shapes for rituals. The Śulba Sūtras included early ideas of the Pythagorean Theorem and ways to find the square root of two.

Pingala, who lived around 300–200 BCE, showed early ideas of what we now call Fibonacci numbers. Another mathematician named Kātyāyana talked about geometry and found the square root of 2 very accurately.

Jain mathematicians were the first to use the word shunya to mean zero. They also created ways to show powers of numbers, like squares and cubes, and solved early algebraic equations.