* Astronomy

Aryabhata was a Hindu mathematical astronomer born in India around 475 AD. By the age of 23 he had already published his most significant work named as Aryabhatiya. Aryabhata was a pioneer in the field of mathematics and astronomy. Although most of his works were lost, his major work "Aryabhatiya" was in fact named by his disciples. The mathematical part of the Aryabhatiya covers arithmetic, algebra, plane and spherical trigonometry, continued fractions, quadratic equations, sums of power series and a table of sines.

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Aryabhatta is the first in the line of great mathematician-astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. His most famous works are the Aryabhatiya (499) and Arya-Siddhanta.
Aryabhata was born in the region lying between Narmada and Godavari, which was known as Ashmaka,and is now identified with Maharashtra, though early Buddhist texts describe Ashmaka as being further south, dakShiNApath or the Deccan, while other texts describe the Ashmakas as having fought Alexander, which would put them further north. Other traditions in India claim that he was from Kerala and that he travelled to the North, or that he was a Maga Brahmin from Gujarat.
However, it is fairly certain that at some point, he went to Kusumapura for higher studies, and that he lived here for some time. Bhaskara I (AD 629) identifies Kusumapura as Pataliputra (modern Patna). He lived there in the dying years of the Gupta empire, the time which is known as the golden age of India, when it was already under Hun attack in the Northeast, during the reign of Buddhagupta and some of the smaller kings before Vishnugupta.

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