- Lived:
- 476–550 CE · birthplace contested (later commentators say the Aśmaka country of the Deccan) → worked at Kusumapura, the "Flower City" quarter of Pāṭaliputra (Patna), in the last bright decades of the Gupta age
- Field:
- astronomy and mathematics — founder of the classical Indian siddhānta tradition's boldest school
- The Big Idea:
- The sky does not turn; the earth spins, and the stars only seem to wheel westward — the same illusion that makes the riverbank drift backward when your boat moves. He wrote that down, with a sine table, a four-decimal π and the true cause of eclipses, in 121 verses, at the age of twenty-three.
- In their words:
- "Just as a man in a boat moving forward sees the stationary objects as moving backward, just so are the stationary stars seen by the people at Laṅkā as moving exactly towards the west." (Āryabhaṭīya, Gola 9, in W. E. Clark's 1930 translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- The first Indian scientist we can date to the year dated himself — 499 CE, age twenty-three — and the claim he timestamped, that the earth rotates, was so far ahead of its time that his own tradition spent a thousand years arguing with it, editing it, and finally, in 1975, naming its first satellite after him.