Aryabhata

Aryabhata (476-c. 550 CE) was an Indian mathematician and astronomer, generally regarded as the first of the major named mathematician-astronomers of the classical age of Indian science, working at what is thought to have been a center of learning at Kusumapura, near present-day Patna. His surviving treatise, the Aryabhatiya, presents a systematic summary of arithmetic, algebra, plane and spherical trigonometry, and mathematical astronomy, including an accurate approximate value for pi and methods for solving indeterminate equations. In astronomy he proposed that the Earth rotates on its own axis to account for the apparent daily motion of the stars, and explained lunar and solar eclipses in terms of the shadows cast by the Earth and Moon, ideas that anticipated later developments and that were transmitted and studied across the Islamic world before reaching medieval Europe.