Mathematicians of India

Many of the ideas in this lab were discovered, or discovered again, by mathematicians in India. Here are ten of them, from the Śulba-Sūtras to the twentieth century (several are named in your Ganita Manjari books), with the activities where their ideas appear.

Baudhāyana

around 800 BCE

His Śulba-Sūtra gives rules for building fire altars with a cord and pegs. It states the Baudhāyana-Pythagoras theorem and gives a very accurate value for √2, the diagonal of a unit square.

In this lab: √n on the Number Line · How Far Apart?

Piṅgala

around the 3rd century BCE

In his book on poetic metres, the Chandaḥśāstra, he counted all patterns of short and long syllables. Each extra syllable doubles the count, the same doubling as a tree diagram of coin tosses.

In this lab: Tree Diagrams · Doubling Sequences

Āryabhaṭa

born 476 CE

His Āryabhaṭīya gave π as about 3.1416 and rules for the sum of a sequence of numbers in steady steps.

In this lab: The C/D Ratio · Gauss Pairs

Brahmagupta

598 – about 668 CE

His Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta laid down rules for zero and negative numbers, which the four-quadrant plane needs. He wrote down the weighted mean, and a formula for the area of a quadrilateral in a circle.

In this lab: Plot the Point · Average of Averages · Opposite Angles in a Circle

Śrīdharācārya

around 750 CE

He used the weighted mean to estimate the purity of mixed gold, essentially today’s carat calculations.

In this lab: Mixing Concentrations

Bhāskara II

1114 – 1185 CE

His Līlāvatī has problems on choices and arrangements, and his Siddhānta Śiromaṇi explains that the surface of a sphere is four times the area of its great circle.

In this lab: Spheres and Hemispheres · Tree Diagrams

Mādhava of Saṅgamagrāma

about 1340 – 1425 CE

The founder of the Kerala school. He found the first exact formula for π as a never-ending sum, which helps show why π is not a simple fraction.

In this lab: Rational or Irrational? · Area of a Circle and a Sector

Srinivasa Ramanujan

1887 – 1920

A self-taught genius from Erode and Kumbakonam who worked with G. H. Hardy in Cambridge. His series for π are so fast that computers still use ideas from them.

In this lab: The C/D Ratio · From Repeating to Fraction

P. C. Mahalanobis

1893 – 1972

He founded the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata in 1931 and showed how large, careful samples give reliable answers for a whole country.

In this lab: Is the Coin Biased? · Reading Stacked Columns

D. R. Kaprekar

1905 – 1986

A school teacher from Devlali who loved number routines. Repeat his steps on most 4-digit numbers and you always reach 6174: an algorithm that always ends, like Euclid’s.

In this lab: Euclid’s Algorithm · From Repeating to Fraction

The CBSE Maths Lab SOP suggests a display of Indian mathematicians. Schools can print this page as a poster set, or ask each group of students to research one name and add a portrait.