MATHEMATICIANS & THEIR INVENTIONS

Introduction:

Mathematics, as a discipline, continues to be of utmost importance in the. The

mathematicians challenged the understanding of the world and left behind a legacy of
breakthrough discovery and research. Being a mathematician is hard. Only a few people have
mastered this subject and achieved fame. The History of Mathematics is overly focused on
the contributions of a small group of male mathematicians while often ignoring the diverse
contributions of women and minorities.
1. Hypatia

Hypatia (370-415 AD)

Hypatia is considered the first known female math teacher in history. Her father was a
prominent Egyptian Mathematician Theon with whom she collaborated on several famous
mathematical works. Since she was the daughter of an upper-class mathematician and
philosopher, she received the same education as her male peers and it wasn’t long before
she proved that she was a more accomplished mathematician than many, including even her
father. She was a Mathematician and Neoplatonist philosopher.

Contribution:

 Leading mathematician of her time.

 First notable female mathematician.
 She helped her father write a newer version of Euclid’s Elements.
 She also helped her father write eleven parts of commentary on Ptolemy’s Alagest.
 She wrote commentaries on mathematical treatises of Diophantus and Apollonius.
 She was becoming a respected teacher of mathematics (which was unheard of for a
woman in Egypt at the time).
 She became a brilliant public speaker and scholar, and she followed her father on
the library's faculty.
 She was a Neoplatonist, believing that mathematics has a spiritual aspect, divided
among the four branches of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
 She taught the philosophical ideas of Neoplatonism with a greater scientific
emphasis.
 She also made several advancements to the field of mathematics.
 She was also known for teaching astronomy.
 She invented an Astrolabe, which is a device used to calculate the date and time
according to the positions of stars and planets for ship navigation.
 She also built a Hydrometer, a tool used to determine densities of fluids.
 She did work on algebraic equations.
 Her work on conic sections and developing the concepts of ellipses, parabolas, and
ellipses by dividing cones into planes brought her into major light.
2. Bhaskara

Bhāskara II (1114 CCE–1185 CCE)

Bhaskara II was born at Vijjadavida, Maharashtra. He is also known as Bhaskaracharya.

He was the leader of a cosmic observatory at Ujjain, the main mathematical centre of
ancient India. Bhaskara and his works represent a significant contribution to mathematical
and astronomical knowledge in the 12th century. He has been called the greatest
mathematician of medieval India. Bhaskara laid the foundation of mathematics in India
through his consequential work. He is the only ancient mathematician who has been
immortalized on a monument.

Contributions:

 He represented number in a positional system.

 He gave the approximation formula for sin x and derived the relation between sine
and cosine.

 He was the first to use a circle for the zero for the Hindu Arabic decimal system.

 He acknowledged that any number divide by zero is infinity and that sum of any
number and infinity is also infinity.

 Nobody after him could write excellent books on mathematics and astronomy in
lucid language in India.

 Famous book – Siddharta Shiromani (“Crown of Treatises") has four parts as

leelavati (“Arithmetic”), Bijaganita ("Algebra"), Goladnayaya (“Spherical celestial
globe”) and Grahahanita (“Maths of planets”).

 He also wrote another treatise named Karana Kautuhala.

 In Siddhanata Shiromani, he developed spherical trigonometry along with a number

of other trigonometric results.

 Lilavati is divided into 13 chapters and covers many branches of mathematics,

arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and a little trigonometry and measurement. More
specifically the contents include: Properties of zero, Estimation of π, Problems
involving interest and interest computation and many more.

 In Lilavati, he gave solutions of quadratic, cubic, and quartic indeterminate

equations.

 Lilavati was written in an poetic language and was translated into many languages
around the world.

 He also discovered solutions of indeterminate quadratic equations called as

Chakravala method.

 Bijaganita was a work in twelve chapters. It was the first text to recognize that a
positive number has two square roots (a positive and negative square root).

 His work is effectively a treatise on algebra and contains the following topics:
Positive and negative numbers, surds, simple and quadratic equations and many
more.

 Integer solution of linear and quadratic indeterminate equations is called kuttaka.

 His method for finding the solution of the problem of the type x 2 – ny2 = 1 is called
as Pell’s equation which is utmost importance.

 Preliminary concepts of infinitesimal calculus and mathematical analysis, along

with a number of results in trigonometry, differential calculus and integral calculus
that are found in the work are of particular interest.

 There is evidence of an early form of Rolle's Theorem in his work. The modern
formulation of Rolle’s theorem states that if f(a) = f(b), then f (́ x) = 0 for some x
with a<x<b.

 Among the many interesting results given by Bhaskara, results found in his works
include computation of sines of angles of 18 and 36 degrees, and the now well -
known formulae for sin(A+B) and sin(A−B).
3. Shakuntala Devi

Shakuntala Devi (1929-2013)

She was born on November 4, 1929, to a traditional Kannada Brahmin family living in
Bangalore. Shakuntala Devi was the first female Mathematician from India. She had to
drop out of school in class one due to her family not being able to afford the fees,
however, this did not hinder her destiny as she was a child prodigy who was able to solve
sums without any formal education.

She was fondly known as the “human computer” for her ability to perform lengthy
calculations in her mind, faster than a computer. Shakuntala Devi (1929-2013) was best
known as “the human computer” for her ability to perform lengthy calculations in her
head, swiftly.

Contributions:

 She is popularly known as “Human Computer”.

 In Dallas at Sothern Methodist College, she calculated the 23rd cube root of 201
digit number in 50 seconds giving the answer 546,372,891 in comparison to a
UNIVAC 1101 computer which took more time to around 12 more seconds to do
the same calculation.

 She holds Guinness Book of World Record for this fastest human computation.

 Devi wrote several books on maths and her techniques of problem-solving.

 At Imperial College London, 1980 she multiplied 7686369774870 and

2465099745779 calculating the 26 digit answer in 28 seconds.

 She was also the first woman mathematician of India.

 She was an ally of L.G.B.T.Q. people.

 In 1977, she published a book titled ‘The World of Homosexuals’, widely regarded
as the first Indian book on homosexuality.

 She established herself as a passionate and consistent LGBTQIA+ ally decades

before most public figures in India, even appearing in the 2001 documentary For
Straights Only to talk about what led her there.

 She applied her mathematical strength to a pursuit of astrology.

 Some books by her were “Puzzles to Puzzle You,” “Super Memory: It Can Be
Yours” and “Math ability: Awaken the Math Genius in Your Child.”

 She once tried to forge a path into politics.

 At Stanford University US, 1988,

She calculated cube root of 95443993 as 457 in 2 seconds.

She calculated cube root of 2373927704 as 1334 in 10 seconds.

She calculated the 8th root of 20047612231936 as 46 in 10 seconds.

4. Aryabhatta

Aryabhata (476–550 CE)

Aryabhata, a great Hindu mathematician lived at Kusumapura or Pataliputara in Magadha

(patna in Bihar) was an excellent teacher with immense knowledge of ancient India. His
extraordinary knowledge covered areas of Mathematics, Astronomy, and Science. He
wrote a comprehensive treatise titled the “Aryabhatiya” which in its range covered various
integral topics of mathematics like trigonometry and algebra. Aryabhata was the first to
give an approximation of the value of pi and also the founder of the Number system.

Contributions:
 He was familiar with place value system.

 He knew numerical symbols and sign of zero.

 He has given the method of addition, subtraction, multiplication of simple and

complex algebraic quantities, e.g; (a+b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2

 He gave the formula for different figures e.g; area of square, rectangle, triangle,
circle, rhombus, etc.

 He also gave method for constructing various figures.

 He aslo gave the formula for finding sum of series of AP.

 According to him, circumference: diameter = π = 3.1411, which is equivalent of

saying that π = 3.1416.

 He is probably the earliest astronomer to use the radian measure for radius of the
circle.

 He made notation system in which digits are denoted with the help of abstract
numerals, e.g; (ka) denotes 1, (kha) denotes 2. etc.

(Aa) denotes 100, (Aaa) denotes 101, € denotes 102, etc.

 He tried to solve the indeterminate linear equations by method of continued

fractions.

 He wrote two works on astronomy – Aryabhatta and Aryabhatta-Sidhnata.

 The subject matter of Aryabhatta consists of 121 stanzas which includes 4 chapters
(Pada or Section)- Gitika Pada, ganita Pada, Kalakriya Pada and Gola Pada.
5. Hipparchus

Hipparchus (190 BC - 120 BC)

Hipparchus was born in 190 BC in the city of Bithynia, Nicaea. He was a famous
astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He was often referred to as the ‘father of
astronomy’. Citizens of Nicaea were very proud of him, and they even used the coins
having pictures of Hipparchus minted on them

Like Geometry, trigonometry chapters are also important for class IX and X students. The
founder of trigonometry was an intelligent mathematician and mythologist Hipparchus. He
was a Greek mathematician who compiled an early example of trigonometric tables and
gave methods for solving spherical triangles.
Contributions:

 He was the first person to develop a well-grounded process by which people can
predict solar eclipses.
 He discovered the first trigonometric table in mathematics.
 Hipparachus table of chords was based on a circle, divided into 360 degrees, where
each degree is further divided into 60 minutes.
 He is believed to be the first astronomer who quoted the accurate time of rising and
setting of zodiac signs.
 He is known as “Father of Trigonometry”.
 Schroder-Hipparchus numbers are also known as super-Catalan numbers is an
integer sequence that can be used to count the number of ways to arrange
parenthesis in a sequence, to count the number of ways of arranging 10 digits, etc.
 He is known to introduce the concept of Combinatorics.
 He also accurately observed the length of the year to make a calendar.
 With the help of parallax, Hipparchus measured the Earth-Moon distance twice.
 He also measure the Earth-Sun distance which was found that the Sun is 1,880
times the size of the Earth, and it is placed at 2,550 Earth radii.
 He was the first to discover a heliocentric system, but he uninhibited his work
because his calculations revealed that the orbits were not circular.
 The concept of magnitude scale was introduced by Hipparchus.
 Hipparchus discovery of Earth’s precision was the most famous discovery of that
time.
SOME OTHER MATHEMATICIANS & THEIR INVENTIONS

Mathematicians Renowned Works and Inventions

Aryabhata Formula: (a + b)2 = a2+ b2 + 2ab
Brahmagupta Introduction of zero (0)
Srinivasa Properties of the partition function.
Ramanujan
P.C. Mahalanobis Mahalanobis Distance
C.R. Rao Theory of Estimation
D.R. Kaprekar Kaprekar numbers, Devlali numbers, the Harshad numbers and Demlo
numbers.
Harish Chandra Representation theory, Harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups.
Satyendra Nath Collaboration with Albert Einstein, Modern theoretical physics in India.
Bose
Bhaskara Declared that any number divided by zero is infinity and that the sum of
any number and infinity is also infinity.
Narendra Karmarkar’s algorithm
Karmarkar
Hypatia Worked on conic sections and developed the concepts of ellipses,
parabolas, and ellipses by dividing cones into planes.
Hero of Alexandria Discovered heron’s formula and square root of the numbers.
Diophantus Worked on algebraic equations (known as father of Algebra)
Antiphon Discovered the value of Pi, calculate the areas of the polygon.
Diocles Subdivision of geometry, ‘Geometry curve’ is known by his name as the
‘Cissoid of Diocles.’
Euclid Euclidean geometry (Known as father of Geometry)
Pythagoras Pythagoras theorem