People Who Shaped Indian History – Learned Men and Women of Ancient India | HCCB

Learned Men and Women of Ancient India by Sreelata Menon is a collection of stories that give you a glimpse into the lives of the greatest rishis and rishikas from Indian history and their quest to unearth and reveal the mysteries and truth about mankind and the universe. Through their lives, learn how these extraordinary individuals laid the foundation for the scientists, doctors, philosophers and inventors of today. 

Let’s start with Aryabhata – read this excerpt to know more about the fifth-century astronomer and earliest Indian mathematician:

‘Aryabhata, Aryabhata,’ his friends called, ‘has anyone seen Aryabhata anywhere?’ Aryabhata lay quiet and still. ‘He must be at the observatory,’ someone yelled back, ‘or on his back gazing at the sky somewhere.’

Aryabhata was indeed lying on his back and gazing at the sky. His mind however was feverishly at work. He was mentally mapping the distance between the stars and the moon.

‘Oh, there you are. You are wanted at the Gurukul,’ said his friend, finally tracking him down. ‘Shh, shh,’ Aryabhata replied, ‘don’t disturb me.’ He continued to do whatever he was doing for a while.

Then, turning to his friend he said, ‘I am telling you, the earth is not flat. It is a sphere rotating on an axis around the sun like the moon. All the planets revolve around the sun too.’ ‘All right,’ agreed his friend, ‘I believe you. But how will you convince the others?’

Unfortunately, nobody was prepared to believe him at that time.

Aryabhata, however, had other ideas as well. ‘What is more,’ he said, ‘eclipses aren’t snakes trying to swallow the moon or lions and demons attacking the sun. It is silly of people to believe that. The lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is covered as it passes directly behind the earth into its shadow. And the solar eclipse is really the sun getting blocked when the moon passes between the earth and the sun. See, I have mathematical calculations to scientifically prove this.’

Again, they scoffed at him.

Nevertheless, Aryabhata was unfazed. He carried on with his calculations and came up with a systemized set of permutations and combinations nobody had ever thought of before. Along with lots of other mathematical problems, he used imaginative methods to work out decimals, squares, cubes, square roots, cube roots, triangles (algebra, arithmetic, plane trigonometry) and even various aspects of astronomy.

Some of these concepts might sound familiar to you. They are being taught in schools even today!

‘Good planets give good effects and bad planets always give bad effects,’ he said, coming up with methods to find, yes, auspicious and inauspicious times.

These same techniques are used by Panditjis to choose wedding muhurthams and calculate the correct time for ceremonies and rituals today.

Aryabhata did not spend too much time contemplating divine revelations unless you count the long hours he spent meditating and reflecting on the movement of the planets, the

earth, the sun, the moon and the stars to arrive at his various conclusions. He loved mathematical puzzles and scientific riddles and spent hours working on dhulikarmans or dustboards to discover mathematical and astronomical solutions that have lasted till today.

Nobody knows for sure where Aryabhata was born. Some say he was born in Kerala and that he went to study at the famous University of Nalanda and then on to Kusumapura (present-day Patna) to work and set up an observatory at the Sun temple in Taregana, Bihar. It is also possible that he was born in Kusumapura itself.

Interestingly, NASA announced Taregana as the best place to watch the 2009 solar eclipse.

When someone asked him when he was born, Aryabhata who knew his Yugas well said mischievously, ‘I was twenty-three years old when sixty times sixty and three quarters of the Kali Yuga had passed.’

To work out the answer to this riddle, you need to remember that the Puranas tell us that there are four Yugas or stages of a ‘divine cycle’, that are of different durations: Krita/Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga and Kali Yuga. They are calculated in divine years which are measured differently from our human years.

(Buy a copy of the book to find out all about these ‘Vedic Units of Time’!)

We are at present in the Kali Yuga, which will last for 1200 divine years and is equal to 432,000 human years. We have only completed some 5000 odd years of it. So, we have a long way to go yet.

So to solve Aryabhata’s riddle, if he was 23 years old when 60×60 ¾ of the Kali Yuga had passed, it would mean that 60×60 = 3600 and ¾ of 432,000 (Kali Yuga), which historians have worked out to be 499 CE. To arrive at his birth year, they subtracted 23 from 499 to get 476 CE. Accordingly, 21st March 476 CE to be precise would perhaps be his birthday!

This puzzle and more are included in his book the ‘Aryabhatiya’. Written in Sanskrit, it is the only one of his many books to survive till date.

Scholars usually wrote in poetic form rather than prose those days, so he put down all his arithmetic conclusions in just 32 witty verses, making them great fun for mathematicians to decipher!

How many miles do you think one round of the earth would be? In Aryabhata’s time, distance was measured in Yojanas. Aryabhata calculated the earth’s circumference to be

about 4967 Yojanas and its diameter to be about 15811/24. If we convert this to modern-day measurements, it works out to 24,835 miles – an answer that is very close to the currently accepted 24,902 miles.

Aryabhata also had a formula to calculate the circumference of a circle whose diameter is 20,000. ‘Add 4 to 100,’ he said. ‘Multiply it by 8 and then add 62,000.’ Again, this value is quite accurate – it is the value of pi (3.1416) that we use today.

Although he overestimated a little, he got very close to ascertaining that there are 365 days to a year and 24 hours to a day.

You might have noticed that things seem to go well in groups of three – the three little pigs, the Three Stooges or even the Three Musketeers. They are funnier, more effective and somehow just right. This Rule of 3 works for mathematicians too, and it was Aryabhata the fun-loving young genius who perfected it to compute his ratios long before anyone else. Using alphabets as numericals for the first time, his Rule of 3 in fact helps find the value of x in algebra more easily when the three values a, b and c are given.

Most important of all, it was Aryabhata who gave the zero a place in the decimal number system for the very first time, thus establishing himself once and for all as a great mathematician and astronomer.

That is why when India launched a satellite into space for the first time a few decades ago, we chose to name it ‘Aryabhata’!

To discover more such stories about the learned people of India, order your copy of Sreelata Menon’s Learned Men and Women today!