Dakshin Bhartiya Empire, Vijayanagar state, capital city - Hampi.
Vijay is still unaware of the impending danger approaching from the Middle East as the quest for a unified sybus continues.
Vijay and the schrs continued their discussion on the mathematics sybus, having already extracted useful content from the academic works of the great schr Baudhayana. Now, they turned their attention to exploring the contributions of Aryabhatta, arguably one of the greatest minds produced by the Bharatiya civilization.
Aryabhatta, a fifth-century polymath, excelled in various disciplines including mathematics, astronomy, astrology, and physics. At the remarkably young age of 23, he penned the "Aryabhatiya," serving as aprehensive summary of the mathematical knowledge of his era.
This was the very book that Vijay chose to bepiled as a textbook. As they opened therge book, they discovered that it was divided into four sections. Delving into the contents section by section, they found that in the first section, Aryabhatta described the method of denotingrge decimal numbers using alphabets.
However, as they progressed to the second section, they encountered content of a significantly advanced nature, leaving many of the schrs taken aback by the unfamiliar concepts presented.
Only a handful of the schrs could grasp the forms and operations presented in the second section. Vijay, however, stood as an exception. Hailing from the future, he found himself quite familiar with most of the concepts described, as they continued to be relevant even in the 21st century.
This section covered challenging questions spanning topics such as number theory, geometry, trigonometry, and algebra.
These concepts were quickly extracted in order to be put into the high school textbook.
As for the remaining two sections of his work, they focused on astronomy. This further illustrates Vijay’s point in establishing astrology as a separate subject because of how knowledgeable the ancient schrs were in the ways of the stars. It was almost simr to the Western scientists being specialists in both their chosen field and theology.
Vijay had the schrs divide theplex mathematical operations into levels and introduced these concepts starting from the 8th standard until the end of college. Vijay even mentioned to name the operations after Aryabhatta.
Hence terms like the Aryabhatta equation, the Aryabhattaws of numerical theory, and the Aryabhattaws ofary movement came out. He was given the same importance in the field of mathematics as Newton in the field of physics by Vijay.
There are more achievements of Aryabhatta where he invented and showed that zero was not only a numeral but also a symbol and a concept. The discovery of zero enabled Aryabhatta to find out the exact distance between the Earth and the moon. This discovery of zero also opened up a new dimension of negative numerals in the world of mathematics.
The science of astronomy was very advanced in ancient India, and it was called Kagol Shastra.
Kagol was the famous astronomical observatory at Nnda where Aryabhatta studied. In this very same premise, Aryabhatta also disregarded the popr view that the Earth is immovable and stated that Earth is round and rotates on its own axis. He also exined that the appearance of the sun moving from east to west is false by giving some examples.
One of the examples he gave was when a person travels in a boat, the trees on the shore appear to move in the opposite direction.
He was also the one to correctly state that the moon and thes shine by reflected sunlight. After this, he also gave a scientific exnation for sr and lunar eclipses, rifying that the eclipse was not because of Rahu or Ketu or some other rakshas, but because of the movement of thes.
This knowledge was taken andpiled into a junior school book, with credit given to Aryabhatta. Vijay, seeing all the great achievements of Aryabhatta right in front of him, couldn’t help but recall what happened when he was a teenager in his past timeline when he was interning at ISRO when the first satellite wasunched from India, named Aryabhatta.
Fortunately, the palm leaves Aryabhatta used were well preserved, and his ancestors regrly transferred the knowledge from one container to another, preserving the ancient scientific heritage of Bharat. But still, He couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss after considering how much knowledge was in Nnda and Takshash before they were burned down.
There was a glow of determination on his face as he thought about it.
After sorting out the works of Aryabhatta, they moved on to Brahmagupta.
Brahmagupta was a schr in the 7th century who took mathematics to heights far beyond his peers. His methods of multiplication, where he used ce value in almost the same way it is used in the 21st century, were a breakthrough at the time. The schrs reading about these things for the first time were overtaken with surprise and happiness.
Vijay named the method after Brahmagupta andpiled it in the basic textbook at the school level.
After Aryabhatta invented zero, he opened the door for the introduction of negative numbers and operations on zero into mathematics. Brahmagupta was the one who travelled the path opened by Aryabhatta. He wrote "Brahmasphuta Siddhanta," which went into detail about negative operations and their concepts, through which the Arabs came to know about the Bharatiya mathematical system.
Arabic numerals gained widespread poprity and praise in Europe for their user-friendly nature, particrly whenpared to Roman or other numeral systems. This trend began in the 16th century, which, considering Bharat’s history, wasn’t too distant in the past. It was introduced by Ladius the Posthumous, the king of Hungary, in 1456.
By the century’s end, Arabic numerals had be immensely popr throughout Europe.
The original Vedic numerical system of Bharat was called the Brahmi system. The Brahmi system was influenced by the Shang numerals of China. The Brahmi numeralster evolved into the Hindu (Gwalior) writing system and further evolved into Sanskrit Devanagari.
It was the Sanskrit Devanagari that highly influenced Arabic writing as it divided into two distinct numerical systems, namely the Eastern Arabic which is still used in Turkey and the Western Arabic (gobar) which went on to evolve further. These numerical systems heavily influenced the 11th-century apices numerical system.
It was in the 15th and 16th centuries that the numerals of the West came very close to the modern 21st-century numerals.
The closest was the 16th-century dürer numerals.
For the Dakshin Bharatiya Empire, the numerals from 0 to 9 use the same system as the rest of the world, but instead of the Anglo-sized numerals, Vijay opted for a mix of Dravidian and Sanskrit numerals to create the Bharti numerals. They are represented as ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?. (0-9)
For the lower sses of UKG, first, and second, these numerals will be used in multiplication tables, division, subtraction, and other operations in a textbook.
After Brahmagupta, the next person Vijay looked at was Bhaskaracharya, who was a schr of the 12th century from Bijapur, which is not far away from Hampi. Vijay and the schrs read his famous book Siddhanta Shiromani, which is divided into four sections arithmetic, algebra, sphere, and mathematics ofs.
While reading the book, the cyclic method to solve algebraic equations was mentioned, which amazed Vijay as it was discovered six centuries after Bhaskaracharya’s time, and waster coined "inverse circle" by European mathematicians. Also, if Vijay remembers correctly, James Taylor tranted the arithmetic book of Bhaskaracharya and made it a widely known work throughout the world.
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The next schr was Mahaviracharya, who was an expert in the mathematics of Jain literature. Although the discoveries of methods were not explicitly mentioned in his book, there were methods on how to solve quadratic equations, operations on fractions, algebraic equations, series, set theories, and logarithms and exponents in a very interesting manner.
Since Vijay, or anyone for that matter, did not know who exactly came up with this math, Vijay decided to name the innovations after the word "Jain." Mahaviracharya also wrote a book called Ganit Sara Sangraha in 850. A.D., which was the first textbook on arithmetic in modern form. He was also the person who came up with the method of solving the leastmon multiple or LCM of given numbers.
More literary books on math werepiled and turned into textbooks for high schools and colleges. The hunt for math knowledge finally ended with theption of 12 math textbooks and many academic records.
Next, it was the turn of science. The first schr they looked through was Kanad. Kanad was a 6th-century scientist of the Vaisheshika school, which was one of the six systems of Bharatiya philosophy. His original name was not Kanad but Aulukya.
He got the name because he was very interested in the minute particles called "kana." Then, he formted an atomic theory where he exined that the material universe is made up of "khana’s," which cannot be seen through any human organ. These cannot be further subdivided as they are indivisible and indestructible. Vijay could tell that this concept aligns a lot with modern atomic theory.
So, Vijay named the atomic theory after him in the science textbook called ’Kanad’s Theory of Kana’(atom).
Varahamihira was another great schr Vijay looked at. Varahamihira lived in the Gupta period and made significant contributions in the fields of hydrology, geology, and ecology. For him, Vijay included separate chapters in the middle school to high school textbooks, focusing on Varahamihira’s knowledge of terrain, both surface and subsurface.
Vijay found the earthquake cloud theory very intriguing as he could not understand how Varahamihira came to this realization. He was surprised by the theory, as it could not be verified even now, and only modern equipment could test it out.
Varahamihira was also highly proficient in Jyotish or astrology. He was one of the only two people, along with Aryabhatta, who sought to present astrology scientifically in a systematic form.
Vijay extracted the scientific part of his two books, which were focused on astrology, and incorporated it into the astronomy textbooks.
The next prominent physicist in the 10th century was called Nagarjuna. He did something simr to what European alchemists did, where the aim of his experiments was to transform base elements into gold. Ultimately he failed, However, he was sessful in making an element with a gold-like sheen. In the book they were reading, a detailed description was provided of how to make the product he created.
Vijay knew the reason for the base turning into a gold-like colour, but he left it for the college students to figure out, as Nagarjuna’s experience was mentioned in a textbook for the students toprehend and try out for themselves.
The rest of the books were based on medical science and yoga. The main schr whose name came up in this section was Sushruta, the first pioneer in the field of surgery. His study of human anatomy, with the help of a dead body, was clearly written in his book Sushruta Samhita.
Over 1100 diseases are mentioned in his book, including fever of 26 kinds, jaundice of 8 kinds, and urinaryplexion of 20 kinds. Along with those, 760 nts are described with all their parts: roots, bark, juice, resin, flowers, etc. He could be almost considered a pioneer of household Ayurvedic remedies.
Vijay extracted a lot of information about botany from his research and made it into a textbook for college and academy levels. Intriguingly enough, in his book, the method of preserving a dead body for the purpose of its detailed study was also mentioned. Vijay changed the subject from a dead body to an animal and made it a meat-preserving technique, incorporating it into a separate textbook.
His most popr contribution in the 21st century was in the field of stic surgery and removal of cataracts. Reading through his books, he had written a very urate step-by-step guide or description of these operations.
Surprisingly, Vijay could identify that the steps followed by Sushruta are strikingly simr to those followed by modern surgeons while performing stic surgery in the 21st century.
In addition, Sushruta Samhita also described various descriptions of 101 instruments used in surgery, many of which were simr to modern operational tools.
Another notable schr in this field was Charak, who was a royal doctor in the kingdom of Kanishka. His Charak Samhita is a remarkable book of medicine which has descriptions of arge number of diseases and provides methods for identifying their causes as well as their treatment.
He was the first to talk about digestion, metabolism, and immunity as important factors for health and medical science.
Intriguingly enough, he also mentioned the fundamentals of gics in his book, which was quite fascinating for Vijay as it was mentioned years before the term was even coined.
Finally, theption of 12 science textbooks, 8 medical books, 7 yoga books, and 13 astrology books waspleted.
P.S. Tomorrow is angr JSb, I will probably dream code today.