Articles
Long-form essays on the Indian mathematical and astronomical tradition.
Articles draw only from the verified-claim corpus. Every paragraph that asserts a fact carries a footnote that links back to the underlying claim, and every claim carries a verbatim quote from a primary or peer-reviewed source. As the platform expands to other civilizations, articles will track those traditions too.
Mathematics · July 5, 2026
The Buddha's math exam: counting to 10⁵³ in the Lalitavistara
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Mathematics · July 5, 2026
The crest of the peacock: the oldest claim that mathematics comes first
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Mathematics · July 5, 2026
One hundred birds for one hundred coins: the puzzle that toured the medieval world
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Mathematics · July 5, 2026
The monkey problem with two right answers: Bhāskara on quadratic roots (1150 CE)
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
The wonder-working fabric: build-your-own cosmos in the Sūrya-Siddhānta
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
The oldest layer: a Vedic five-year calendar preserved inside a 505 CE review
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
Astronomy without arithmetic: Varāhamihira's diagram computer (505 CE)
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Mathematics · July 5, 2026
A verse that is a number: π to seventeen places in the Sadratnamālā (1819)
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Mathematics · July 5, 2026
Moon-eyes-fires-oceans: writing numbers as poetry
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
Right about the Moon, wrong about the Sun: the Sūrya-Siddhānta sizes the neighbors
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.1 seconds: Aryabhata times the Earth's spin (499 CE)
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Mathematics · July 5, 2026
Tell me, charming woman: the algebra textbook written as poetry (1150 CE)
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Mathematics · July 5, 2026
The thousand-year road trip of the digits 0–9
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
The solstice has moved: Varāhamihira reads precession out of the archives (505 CE)
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
The Roman Siddhānta: Greek astronomy inside the Indian canon (505 CE)
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
One second per month: the Sūrya-Siddhānta's lunar orbit
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Mathematics · July 5, 2026
Counting to a trillion in the Vedic era: the Yajurveda's ladder of tens
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Mathematics · July 5, 2026
Bhāskara II divides by zero — and names the result (1150 CE)
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
A globe in the ether: the Sūrya-Siddhānta on why there is no 'up'
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Astronomy · July 5, 2026
Half in shadow, half toward the Sun: Aryabhata on why the Moon shines (499 CE)
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Mathematics · May 26, 2026
Pingala's binary exponentiation algorithm — ~200 BCE, for counting Sanskrit metres
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
The Bakhshali manuscript: earliest known dot-symbol for zero, carbon-dated to as early as the 3rd century CE
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Aryabhata's alphabetic numeral code — compressing astronomical constants in 499 CE
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Mahāvīra: a negative quantity has no square root — the first acknowledgement of imaginary numbers as impossible
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Mahāvīra writes the first explicit ellipse-area formula in surviving Sanskrit mathematics
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Mahāvīra writes down nCr — 800 years before Pascal's Triangle
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Brahmagupta on the multiplication of negatives — 1,000 years before Europe accepts negative roots
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Brahmagupta's bhāvanā — the composition lemma chakravala stood on
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Aryabhata writes the sum of squares and sum of cubes — 1,100 years before Faulhaber
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Aryabhata gives the kuttaka — 1,300 years before the Chinese Remainder Theorem and RSA
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Astronomy · May 25, 2026
Surya-Siddhanta gives the precession of the equinoxes — but is it oscillation or progression?
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Astronomy · May 25, 2026
The Surya-Siddhanta knows Mars to within 2 hours per orbit — pre-telescopic accuracy across the whole planet system
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Astronomy · May 25, 2026
Surya-Siddhanta has an eclipse-duration formula — same geometry as modern eclipse-timing code
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Astronomy · May 25, 2026
Aryabhata gives the obliquity of the ecliptic as 24° — accurate for ~5,000 years before he wrote it
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Astronomy · May 25, 2026
Aryabhata gives Earth a diameter — 1,050 yojanas, depending on which yojana you mean
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Brahmagupta's cyclic-quadrilateral formula: Heron, one dimension further, 1,200 years before Europe
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Mathematics · May 25, 2026
Bhāskara II writes down the Pythagorean theorem — already 2,000 years old in India when he did
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Astronomy · May 25, 2026
The Surya-Siddhanta knows the length of the year — to within 3.5 minutes, pre-telescopic
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Astronomy · May 25, 2026
Aryabhata gets eclipses right: the geometric explanation 1,000 years before Indian astronomy accepted it
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Mathematics · May 17, 2026
Aryabhata 499 CE: 24 numbers that became the world's first sine table
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Astronomy · May 15, 2026
Surya-Siddhanta gives Saturn's sidereal period within 0.06% of NASA's value, in the 5th century CE
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Mathematics · May 14, 2026
Brahmagupta in 628 CE: the world's first explicit arithmetic of zero (including a wrong-but-pioneering division-by-zero attempt)
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Astronomy · May 14, 2026
Aryabhata wrote a 4.35-billion-year cosmic clock. Modern Earth age: 4.54 billion. A 5% accidental match.
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Astronomy · May 14, 2026
Aryabhata on Earth rotation: 1,044 years before Copernicus, with a 7-word analogy for relativity of motion
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Mathematics · May 14, 2026
Bhaskara II solved x²·61+1=y², 507 years before Fermat called it unsolvable
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Mathematics · May 14, 2026
Aryabhata gives pi: the first explicit acknowledgement of an irrational constant
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