Aryabhata is the author of several treatises on mathematics and astronomy, some o f which are lost.

His major work, Aryabhatiya, a compendium of mathematics and a stronomy, was extensively referred to in the Indian mathematical literature and has survived to modern times. The mathematical part of the Aryabhatiya covers ar ithmetic, algebra, plane trigonometry, and spherical trigonometry. It also conta ins continued fractions, quadratic equations, sums-of-power series, and a table of sines. The Arya-siddhanta, a lost work on astronomical computations, is known through t he writings of Aryabhata's contemporary, Varahamihira, and later mathematicians and commentators, including Brahmagupta and Bhaskara I. This work appears to be based on the older Surya Siddhanta and uses the midnight-day reckoning, as oppos ed to sunrise in Aryabhatiya. It also contained a description of several astrono mical instruments: the gnomon (shanku-yantra), a shadow instrument (chhAyA-yantr a), possibly angle-measuring devices, semicircular and circular (dhanur-yantra / chakra-yantra), a cylindrical stick yasti-yantra, an umbrella-shaped device cal led the chhatra-yantra, and water clocks of at least two types, bow-shaped and c ylindrical.[3] A third text, which may have survived in the Arabic translation, is Al ntf or Al -nanf. It claims that it is a translation by Aryabhata, but the Sanskrit name of this work is not known. Probably dating from the 9th century, it is mentioned b y the Persian scholar and chronicler of India, Ab Rayhn al-Brn.[3] [edit]Aryabhatiya Direct details of Aryabhata's work are known only from the Aryabhatiya. The name "Aryabhatiya" is due to later commentators. Aryabhata himself may not have give n it a name. His disciple Bhaskara I calls it Ashmakatantra (or the treatise fro m the Ashmaka). It is also occasionally referred to as Arya-shatas-aShTa (litera lly, Aryabhata's 108), because there are 108 verses in the text. It is written i n the very terse style typical of sutra literature, in which each line is an aid to memory for a complex system. Thus, the explication of meaning is due to comm entators. The text consists of the 108 verses and 13 introductory verses, and is divided into four pdas or chapters: Gitikapada: (13 verses): large units of timekalpa, manvantra, and yugawhich presen t a cosmology different from earlier texts such as Lagadha's Vedanga Jyotisha (c . 1st century BCE). There is also a table of sines (jya), given in a single vers e. The duration of the planetary revolutions during a mahayuga is given as 4.32 million years. Ganitapada (33 verses): covering mensuration (ketra vyvahra), arithmetic and geomet ric progressions, gnomon / shadows (shanku-chhAyA), simple, quadratic, simultane ous, and indeterminate equations (kuTTaka) Kalakriyapada (25 verses): different units of time and a method for determining the positions of planets for a given day, calculations concerning the intercalar y month (adhikamAsa), kShaya-tithis, and a seven-day week with names for the day s of week. Golapada (50 verses): Geometric/trigonometric aspects of the celestial sphere, f eatures of the ecliptic, celestial equator, node, shape of the earth, cause of d ay and night, rising of zodiacal signs on horizon, etc. In addition, some versio ns cite a few colophons added at the end, extolling the virtues of the work, etc . The Aryabhatiya presented a number of innovations in mathematics and astronomy i n verse form, which were influential for many centuries. The extreme brevity of the text was elaborated in commentaries by his disciple Bhaskara I (Bhashya, c. 600 CE) and by Nilakantha Somayaji in his Aryabhatiya Bhasya, (1465 CE). [edit]Mathematics [edit]Place value system and zero The place-value system, first seen in the 3rd century Bakhshali Manuscript, was clearly in place in his work. While he did not use a symbol for zero, the French mathematician Georges Ifrah explains that knowledge of zero was implicit in Ary abhata's place-value system as a place holder for the powers of ten with null co efficients[8]

However, Aryabhata did not use the Brahmi numerals. Continuing the Sanskritic tr adition from Vedic times, he used letters of the alphabet to denote numbers, exp ressing quantities, such as the table of sines in a mnemonic form.[9] [edit]Approximation of Aryabhata worked on the a roximation for i (), and may have come to the conclus ion that is irrational. In the second art of the Aryabhatiyam (gaita da 10), he w rites: caturadhikam atamaaguam dvaistath sahasrm ayutadvayavikambhasysanno vttapariha. "Add four to 100, multiply by eight, and then add 62,000. By this rule the circu mference of a circle with a diameter of 20,000 can be approached."[10] This implies that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is ((4 + 100) 8 + 62000)/20000 = 62832/20000 = 3.1416, which is accurate to five significant fi gures. It is speculated that Aryabhata used the word sanna (approaching), to mean that n ot only is this an approximation but that the value is incommensurable (or irrat ional). If this is correct, it is quite a sophisticated insight, because the irr ationality of pi was proved in Europe only in 1761 by Lambert.[11] After Aryabhatiya was translated into Arabic (c. 820 CE) this approximation was mentioned in Al-Khwarizmi's book on algebra.[3] [edit]Trigonometry In Ganitapada 6, Aryabhata gives the area of a triangle as tribhujasya phalashariram samadalakoti bhujardhasamvargah that translates to: "for a triangle, the result of a perpendicular with the half -side is the area."[12] Aryabhata discussed the concept of sine in his work by the name of ardha-jya. Li terally, it means "half-chord". For simplicity, people started calling it jya. W hen Arabic writers translated his works from Sanskrit into Arabic, they referred it as jiba. However, in Arabic writings, vowels are omitted, and it was abbrevi ated as jb. Later writers substituted it with jiab, meaning "cove" or "bay." (In Arabic, jiba is a meaningless word.) Later in the 12th century, when Gherardo o f Cremona translated these writings from Arabic into Latin, he replaced the Arab ic jiab with its Latin counterpart, sinus, which means "cove" or "bay". And afte r that, the sinus became sine in English.[13] [edit]Indeterminate equations A problem of great interest to Indian mathematicians since ancient times has bee n to find integer solutions to equations that have the form ax + by = c, a topic that has come to be known as diophantine equations. This is an example from Bhsk ara's commentary on Aryabhatiya: Find the number which gives 5 as the remainder when divided by 8, 4 as the remai nder when divided by 9, and 1 as the remainder when divided by 7 That is, find N = 8x+5 = 9y+4 = 7z+1. It turns out that the smallest value for N is 85. In general, diophantine equations, such as this, can be notoriously diff icult. They were discussed extensively in ancient Vedic text Sulba Sutras, whose more ancient parts might date to 800 BCE. Aryabhata's method of solving such pr oblems is called the kuaka ( ) method. Kuttaka means "pulverizing" or "breaking into l pieces", and the method involves a recursive algorithm for writing the origina l factors in smaller numbers. Today this algorithm, elaborated by Bhaskara in 62 1 CE, is the standard method for solving first-order diophantine equations and i s often referred to as the Aryabhata algorithm.[14] The diophantine equations ar e of interest in cryptology, and the RSA Conference, 2006, focused on the kuttak a method and earlier work in the Sulbasutras. [edit]Algebra In Aryabhatiya Aryabhata provided elegant results for the summation of series of squares and cubes:[15] and [edit]Astronomy

Aryabhata's system of astronomy was called the audAyaka system, in which days ar e reckoned from uday, dawn at lanka or "equator". Some of his later writings on astronomy, which apparently proposed a second model (or ardha-rAtrikA, midnight) are lost but can be partly reconstructed from the discussion in Brahmagupta's k hanDakhAdyaka. In some texts, he seems to ascribe the apparent motions of the he avens to the Earth's rotation. He also treated the planet's orbits as elliptical rather than circular.[16][17] [edit]Motions of the solar system Aryabhata correctly insisted that the earth rotates about its axis daily, and th at the apparent movement of the stars is a relative motion caused by the rotatio n of the earth, contrary to the then-prevailing view that the sky rotated. This is indicated in the first chapter of the Aryabhatiya, where he gives the number of rotations of the earth in a yuga,[18] and made more explicit in his gola chap ter:[19] In the same way that someone in a boat going forward sees an unmoving [object] g oing backward, so [someone] on the equator sees the unmoving stars going uniform ly westward. The cause of rising and setting [is that] the sphere of the stars t ogether with the planets [apparently?] turns due west at the equator, constantly pushed by the cosmic wind. Aryabhata described a geocentric model of the solar system, in which the Sun and Moon are each carried by epicycles. They in turn revolve around the Earth. In t his model, which is also found in the Paitmahasiddhnta (c. CE 425), the motions of the planets are each governed by two epicycles, a smaller manda (slow) and a la rger ghra (fast). [20] The order of the planets in terms of distance from earth is taken as: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the ast erisms."[3] The positions and periods of the planets was calculated relative to uniformly mo ving points. In the case of Mercury and Venus, they move around the Earth at the same mean speed as the Sun. In the case of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, they move around the Earth at specific speeds, representing each planet's motion through the zodiac. Most historians of astronomy consider that this two-epicycle model r eflects elements of pre-Ptolemaic Greek astronomy.[21] Another element in Aryabh ata's model, the ghrocca, the basic planetary period in relation to the Sun, is se en by some historians as a sign of an underlying heliocentric model.[22] [edit]Eclipses Solar and lunar eclipses were scientifically explained by Aryabhata. Aryabhata s tates that the Moon and planets shine by reflected sunlight. Instead of the prev ailing cosmogony in which eclipses were caused by pseudo-planetary nodes Rahu an d Ketu, he explains eclipses in terms of shadows cast by and falling on Earth. T hus, the lunar eclipse occurs when the moon enters into the Earth's shadow (vers e gola.37). He discusses at length the size and extent of the Earth's shadow (ve rses gola.3848) and then provides the computation and the size of the eclipsed pa rt during an eclipse. Later Indian astronomers improved on the calculations, but Aryabhata's methods provided the core. His computational paradigm was so accura te that 18th century scientist Guillaume Le Gentil, during a visit to Pondicherr y, India, found the Indian computations of the duration of the lunar eclipse of 30 August 1765 to be short by 41 seconds, whereas his charts (by Tobias Mayer, 1 752) were long by 68 seconds.[3] [edit]Sidereal periods Considered in modern English units of time, Aryabhata calculated the sidereal ro tation (the rotation of the earth referencing the fixed stars) as 23 hours, 56 m inutes, and 4.1 seconds;[23] the modern value is 23:56:4.091. Similarly, his val ue for the length of the sidereal year at 365 days, 6 hours, 12 minutes, and 30 seconds (365.25858 days)[24] is an error of 3 minutes and 20 seconds over the le ngth of a year (365.25636 days).[25] [edit]Heliocentrism As mentioned, Aryabhata advocated an astronomical model in which the Earth turns on its own axis. His model also gave corrections (the gra anomaly) for the speeds of the planets in the sky in terms of the mean speed of the sun. Thus, it has b een suggested that Aryabhata's calculations were based on an underlying heliocen

tric model, in which the planets orbit the Sun,[26][27][28] though this has been rebutted.[29] It has also been suggested that aspects of Aryabhata's system may have been derived from an earlier, likely pre-Ptolemaic Greek, heliocentric mod el of which Indian astronomers were unaware,[30] though the evidence is scant.[3 1] The general consensus is that a synodic anomaly (depending on the position of the sun) does not imply a physically heliocentric orbit (such corrections being also present in late Babylonian astronomical texts), and that Aryabhata's syste m was not explicitly heliocentric.[32] [edit]Legacy Aryabhata's work was of great influence in the Indian astronomical tradition and influenced several neighbouring cultures through translations. The Arabic trans lation during the Islamic Golden Age (c. 820 CE), was particularly influential. Some of his results are cited by Al-Khwarizmi and in the 10th century Al-Biruni stated that Aryabhata's followers believed that the Earth rotated on its axis. His definitions of sine (jya), cosine (kojya), versine (utkrama-jya), and invers e sine (otkram jya) influenced the birth of trigonometry. He was also the first to specify sine and versine (1 cos x) tables, in 3.75 intervals from 0 to 90, to an accuracy of 4 decimal laces. In fact, modern names "sine" and "cosine" are mistranscri tions of the words jya and kojya as introduced by Aryabhata. As mentioned, they were translated as jib a and kojiba in Arabic and then misunderstood by Gerard of Cremona while transla ting an Arabic geometry text to Latin. He assumed that jiba was the Arabic word jaib, which means "fold in a garment", L. sinus (c. 1150).[33] Aryabhata's astronomical calculation methods were also very influential. Along w ith the trigonometric tables, they came to be widely used in the Islamic world a nd used to com ute many Arabic astronomical tables (zijes). In articular, the a stronomical tables in the work of the Arabic S ain scientist Al Zarqali (11th ce ntury) were translated into Latin as the Tables of Toledo (12th c.) and remained the most accurate e hemeris used in Euro e for centuries. Calendric calculations devised by Aryabhata and his followers have been in conti nuous use in India for the ractical ur oses of fixing the Panchangam (the Hind u calendar). In the Islamic world, they formed the basis of the Jalali calendar introduced in 1073 CE by a grou of astronomers including Omar Khayyam,[34] vers ions of which (modified in 1925) are the national calendars in use in Iran and A fghanistan today. The dates of the Jalali calendar are based on actual solar tra nsit, as in Aryabhata and earlier Siddhanta calendars. This ty e of calendar req uires an e hemeris for calculating dates. Although dates were difficult to com u te, seasonal errors were less in the Jalali calendar than in the Gregorian calen dar. India's first satellite Aryabhata and the lunar crater Aryabhata are named in hi s honour. An Institute for conducting research in astronomy, astro hysics and at mos heric sciences is the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Science s (ARIES) near Nainital, India. The inter school Aryabhata Maths Com etition is also named after him,[35] as is Bacillus aryabhata, a s ecies of bacteria discov ered by ISRO scientists in 2009.[36] [edit] Birth Aryabhata mentions in the Aryabhatiya that it was com osed 3,600 years into the Kali Yuga, when he was 23 years old. This corres onds to 499 CE, and im lies tha t he was born in 476 CE. Aryabhata rovides no information about his lace of birth. The only information comes from Bhskara I, who describes Aryabhata as makya, "one belonging to the amaka country." It is widely attested that, during the Buddha's time, a branch of the Amaka people settled in the region between the Narmada and Godavari rivers in cen tral India, today the South GujaratNorth Maharashtra region. Aryabhata is believe d to have been born there.[1][3] However, early Buddhist texts describe Ashmaka

as being further south, in dakshinapath or the Deccan, while other texts describ e the Ashmakas as having fought Alexander,