- Lived:
- c. 3rd–2nd century BCE — where, nobody knows; scholarly datings run from the 4th century BCE to the turn of the era, and all we securely possess is the book that carries his name
- Field:
- chandas — prosody, the science of verse metres, one of the six vedāṅgas, the "limbs of the Veda"; the mathematics fell out of the poetics
- The Big Idea:
- Trying merely to list every possible rhythm a Sanskrit line can carry, he built the machinery of binary enumeration — recursive listing, indexing and un-indexing, the counts we call Pascal's triangle and the Fibonacci numbers — and used a written mark called śūnya, "empty," that stands at the head of zero's paper trail.
- In their words:
- "rūpe śūnyam; dviḥ śūnye" — "When one [remains], [write] the empty; at the empty, double." (Chandaḥśāstra 8.29–30, the halving-and-doubling rule)
- If you remember one thing:
- A man cataloguing poetry — light syllable, heavy syllable, every arrangement in order — stumbled into the raw materials of computer science two thousand years before anyone needed a computer, and never once thought he was doing mathematics.