5 Mathematical Inventions Of Ancient India That Have Changed The World

India has long been the cradle of mathematical inventions that have the power to change the world. Recently, it was discovered that Indians used number zero as early as the 3^rd and 4^th century.

3,000 years ago, Indian mathematicians made several breakthroughs which took their counterparts in Europe centuries later to discover the same thing. In the meantime, these inventions had made its way to the Middle East and China.

However, the concept of zero is not the only well-known invention of an Indian mathematician. They also contributed significantly to algebra, negative numbers, trigonometry, and other areas. Interestingly, the decimal system we are using today was first spotted in India.

The Number System

As early as 1200 BC, knowledge in mathematics was jotted down in the Vedas, a large body of text recording hymns and some other ancient religious recordings, written between 1500 and 1000 BCE. In there, numbers were described as combinations of powers of ten. For instance, the number 365 was written like this: 3x10², 6x10¹, and 5x10⁰ (three hundred, six tens, five units). However, these powers of ten were recorded as names, not symbols. It is believed that this way of writing numbers played an essential part in the growth of the decimal place-value system in the country.

We have evidence of Brahmi numerals, which laid the very foundation of the Indian and Hindu-Arabic numeral system that is widely used all over the world today. After number zero was introduced, Indian mathematicians had everything they needed to develop their mathematics knowledge.

The Concept Of Zero

Number zero has quite a long history. It was first recorded in the Bakhshali manuscript, but back then, the number was a mere placeholder. It was used to tell 10 and 100 apart. Mayan and Babylonian cultures had shown similar marks in the early centuries AD, and around 3000 – 2000 BC in Sumerian mathematics.

However, India was the place where that placeholder evolved into a separate number in its own right. Zero has made it is more efficient and reliable to write numbers. Another great benefit was the aid in record-keeping, which means a lot to calculations in finance, allowing people to check them retroactively for honesty. There is no denial that zero is a vital step to the democratization of mathematics.

It seems like in 600AD, Indians had almost everything they ever needed to fuel a wave of discoveries in mathematics, from the available tools to handle math concepts to a culture that welcomed science developments.

At the same time, these conditions were not available for their counterparts in the West until the 13^th century.

Solutions Of Quadratic Equations

The 7^th century in the Brahmasputha Siddhanta, there was a recording of rules for working with zero. Brahmagupta, an astronomer, talked about the way people can handle computing square roots and quadratic equations

Rules For Negative Numbers

Quadratic equations were not the only problems Brahmagupta introduced rules for. There were also ways to work with negative numbers. In the text, he called the negative numbers debts and the positive ones fortunes.

You may recognize these statements as something school taught us but in different terms. What we know is like this, subtracting a negative number is the same thing as adding a positive one.

Another rule he wrote was “the product of a debt and a fortune is a debt,” which can be translated to modern language as if you multiply a positive number by a negative number, the result is negative.

While the concept of negative numbers was welcomed and accepted in India, in Europe, most mathematicians objected the idea of these figures. The argued that numbers were for counting so negative numbers had no use whatsoever in this task. To answer what European mathematicians wondered, experts in India and China had the answer, which is debts.

Basis For Calculus

Their denial of zero and negative numbers hindered European mathematicians in the way to develop their own knowledge of math.

It was not until the 17^th century that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz used negative numbers and zero in his development of calculus, which played a vital role in almost all branches of science, especially physics.

However, Bhāskara had discovered the same thing around 500 years before Leibniz.