mathematician

Bhāskara II 

Bhaskara the teacher, Bhaskara Achārya, Bhaskara II, Bhāskarācārya

FAMOUS AS

Mathematician

NATIONALITY

Indian    Famous Indian Men

RELIGION

Hinduism

BORN

1114 AD

DIED AT AGE

71

BORN IN

Bijapur

DIED ON

1185 AD

 Bhāskara II’s mathematical works (written in verse like nearly all Indian mathematical classics), particularly Līlāvatī (“The Beautiful”) and Bījagaṇita (“Seed Counting”), he not only used the decimal system but also compiled problems from Brahmagupta and others. He filled many of the gaps in Brahmagupta’s work, especially in obtaining a general solution to the Pell equation (x2 = 1 + py2) and in giving many particular solutions (e.g., x2 = 1 + 61y2, which has the solution x = 1,766,319,049 and y = 226,153,980; French mathematician Pierre de Fermat proposed this same problem as a challenge to his friend Frenicle de Bessy five centuries later in 1657). Bhāskara II anticipated the modern convention of signs (minus by minus makes plus, minus by plus makes minus) and evidently was the first to gain some understanding of the meaning of division by zero, for he specifically stated that the value of 3/0 is an infinite quantity, though his understanding seems to have been limited, for he also stated wrongly that a⁄0 × 0 = a. Bhāskara II used letters to represent unknown quantities, much as in modern algebra, and solved indeterminate equations of 1st and 2nd degrees. He reduced quadratic equations to a single type and solved them and investigated regular polygons up to those having 384 sides, thus obtaining a good approximate value of π = 3.141666.