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← 🇮🇳 Indian history · usually met in Std 6-12

Indian mathematicians

Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara, Madhava, Ramanujan — a line running from the fifth century to the twentieth.

Aryabhata, in 499 CE, gave an approximation of pi, a table of sines, and the idea that the Earth rotates. Brahmagupta, in the seventh century, wrote the first clear rules for arithmetic with zero and negative numbers. Bhaskara II, in the twelfth, wrote the Lilavati, posing problems in verse, and worked with ideas close to the derivative. Madhava of Sangamagrama, around 1400, found infinite series for sine, cosine and arctangent.

Srinivasa Ramanujan, born in 1887 in Erode, had almost no formal training and filled notebooks with results he said came to him whole. His correspondence with G. H. Hardy brought him to Cambridge, and mathematicians are still proving things he simply wrote down. He died at 32. The Indian National Mathematics Day falls on his birthday, 22 December.

Worth knowing

  • The Lilavati was a standard textbook for centuries and is addressed throughout to a student.
  • Ramanujan's lost notebook, found in 1976, set off decades of further work.
  • Shakuntala Devi's mental arithmetic was recorded in the twentieth century as a separate kind of remarkable.

Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “Indian mathematicians” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.

See also

🇮🇳 Science in ancient and medieval India📐 Number systems📐 Pi

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Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written

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