BRAHMAGUPTABrahmagupta (598–668 CE)
The great 7th Century Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta wrote
some important works on both mathematics and astronomy. He was from the state
of Rajasthan of northwest India (he is often referred to as Bhillamalacarya,
the teacher from Bhillamala), and later became the head of the astronomical
observatory at Ujjain in central India. Most of his works are composed in
elliptic verse, a common practice in Indian mathematics at the time, and
consequently have something of a poetic ring to them.
It seems likely that Brahmagupta's
works, especially his most famous text, the “Brahmasphutasiddhanta”, were
brought by the 8th Century Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur to his newly founded centre
of learning at Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris, providing an important link
between Indian mathematics and astronomy and the nascent upsurge in science and
mathematics in the Islamic world.
In his work on arithmetic,
Brahmagupta explained how to find the cube and cube-root of an integer and gave
rules facilitating the computation of squares and square roots. He also gave
rules for dealing with five types of combinations of fractions. He gave the sum
of the squares of the first n natural numbers as n(n + 1)(2n + 1)⁄ 6 and the
sum of the cubes of the first n natural numbers as (n(n + 1)⁄2)².
Brahmagupta’s rules for
dealing with zero and negative numbers.
Brahmagupta’s genius, though, came in his treatment of the concept of
(then relatively new) the number zero. Although often also attributed to the
7th Century Indian mathematician Bhaskara I, his “Brahmasphutasiddhanta” is
probably the earliest known text to treat zero as a number in its own right,
rather than as simply a placeholder digit as was done by the Babylonians, or as
a symbol for a lack of quantity as was done by the Greeks and Romans.
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