Person: Madhava Of Sangamagramma
Madhava was a mathematician from South India. He made some important advances in infinite series including finding the expansions for trigonometric functions.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- It is only due to research into Keralese mathematics over the last twenty-five years that the remarkable contributions of Madhava have come to light.
- All the mathematical writings of Madhava have been lost, although some of his texts on astronomy have survived.
- Madhava discovered the series equivalent to the Maclaurin expansions of sin xxx, cos xxx, and arctan xxx around 1400, which is over two hundred years before they were rediscovered in Europe.
- This is a remarkable passage describing Madhava's series, but remember that even this passage by Jyesthadeva was written more than 100 years before James Gregory rediscovered this series expansion.
- Perhaps we should write down in modern symbols exactly what the series is that Madhava has found.
- Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that Madhava gave a remainder term for his series which improved the approximation.
- There has been a lot of work done in trying to reconstruct how Madhava might have found his correction terms.
- Madhava also gave a table of almost accurate values of half-sine chords for twenty-four arcs drawn at equal intervals in a quarter of a given circle.
- Jyesthadeva in Yukti-Bhasa gave an explanation of how Madhava found his series expansions around 1400 which are equivalent to these modern versions rediscovered by Newton around 1676.
- Historians have claimed that the method used by Madhava amounts to term by term integration.
- Rajagopal's claim that Madhava took the decisive step towards modern classical analysis seems very fair given his remarkable achievements.
Born 1350, Sangamagramma (near Cochin), Kerala, India. Died 1425, India.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Ancient Indian, Astronomy, Origin India, Special Numbers And Numerals
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
