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( Aryabhata)
Aryabha?a (Devanagari ??????) (AD 476 – 550) is the first in the line of great mathematician-astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. Aryabhata is the father of the Hindu-Arabic number system which has become universal today. His most famous works are the Aryabhatiya (AD 499 at age of 23 years) and Arya-Siddhanta. Though Aryabhata's year of birth is clearly mentioned in Aryabhatiya, exact location of his place of birth remains a matter of contention amongst the scholars. Some scholars argue that Aryabhata was born in Kusumapura, while others argue that Aryabhata was from Kerala.[1]Some believe he was born in the region lying between Narmada and Godavari, which was known as Ashmaka and they identify Ashmaka with central India including Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, though early Buddhist texts describe Ashmaka as being further south, dakShiNApath or the Deccan, while other texts describe the Ashmakas as having fought Alexander, which would put them further north.[2] Recently in one of the scholarly studies based upon the astronomical readings in his works, it has been pointed out that Aryabhata's location may have been in Ponnani, Kerala .[3] However, it is fairly certain that at some point, he went to Kusumapura for higher studies, and that he lived here for some time.[4] Bhaskara I (AD 629) identifies Kusumapura as Pataliputra (modern Patna). He lived there in the dying years of the Gupta empire, the time which is known as the golden age of India, when it was already under Hun attack in the Northeast, during the reign of Buddhagupta and some of the smaller kings before Vishnugupta. Aryabhata is the author of several treatises on mathematics and astronomy, some of which are lost. His major work, Aryabhatiya, a compendium of mathematics and astronomy, was extensively referred to in the Indian mathematical literature, and has survived to modern times. 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.
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