Indian History Quiz: Science and Mathematics in Ancient India

Aryabhata, born in 476 CE, wrote the Aryabhatiya in 499 CE in four sections: the Gitikapada on units of time and the large astronomical cycles, the Ganitapada on mathematics, the Kalakriyapada on the reckoning of time and planetary positions, and the Golapada on the celestial sphere.

Brahmagupta composed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta in 628 CE, in which he treated zero as a number and not merely as a placeholder and gave rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying positive and negative quantities, which he called fortunes and debts; he also wrote the Khandakhadyaka and argued that bodies fall because…

Bhaskara II, also called Bhaskaracharya, wrote the Siddhanta Shiromani in 1150 CE in four parts, of which Lilavati deals with arithmetic, mensuration and problems of everyday calculation, Bijaganita with algebra, and Grahaganita and Goladhyaya with astronomy.

The Sushruta Samhita is the classical manual of shalya chikitsa or surgery, describing surgical instruments, the removal of the cataract, the setting of fractures, the stitching of wounds and the rebuilding of a severed nose, for which Sushruta is remembered as the father of surgery and of plastic surgery.

The Sulbasutras are appendices to the Shrauta Sutras and give the geometrical rules for laying out the brick altars of Vedic sacrifice, including the construction of squares and rectangles of a given area and the statement that the square on the diagonal equals the sum of the squares on the…

Varahamihira, who lived in the sixth century, summarised five earlier astronomical schools in the Panchasiddhantika, wrote the encyclopaedic Brihat Samhita covering astronomy, omens, architecture, gems and the finding of underground water, and composed the Brihat Jataka on horoscopy.

Mahaviracharya was a Jain mathematician of the ninth century associated with the Rashtrakuta court, and his Ganita Sara Sangraha is a systematic treatment of arithmetic operations, fractions, series and the areas and volumes of figures, and it was widely used in south India.

Kanada founded the Vaisheshika school, which classified the categories of existence and held that material things are made of paramanu, indivisible atoms that combine in pairs and larger groups to form the objects we see; the doctrine was reached by reasoning about divisibility rather than by experiment.

The Sanskrit inscription on the Mehrauli pillar praises a king called Chandra, whom historians identify with the Gupta ruler Chandragupta II Vikramaditya, and the pillar's wrought iron has resisted corrosion for about sixteen centuries because of its phosphorus content and the protective film it forms, which is the standard example…

Madhava of Sangamagrama, who lived around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, founded the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics, whose members obtained infinite series expansions for pi and for the sine and cosine, anticipating results that Europe reached much later; Nilakantha Somayaji of the same school wrote the Tantrasamgraha in…

The Brihat-trayi or great triad of Ayurveda is made up of the Charaka Samhita on internal medicine, the Sushruta Samhita on surgery and the Ashtanga Hridaya of Vagbhata, who also wrote the Ashtanga Sangraha.

India's first satellite, launched in 1975, was named Aryabhata after the astronomer who wrote the Aryabhatiya in 499 CE, explained day and night by the rotation of the earth on its axis and gave a value of pi equivalent to 3.1416.