Person: Apastamba

Apastamba was the Indian author of one of the most interesting of the Indian Sulbasutras from a mathematical point of view.

It would also be fair to say that Apastamba's Sulbasutra is the most interesting from a mathematical point of view.
We do not know Apastamba's dates accurately enough to even guess at a life span for him, which is why we have given the same approximate birth year as death year.
Apastamba was neither a mathematician in the sense that we would understand it today, nor a scribe who simply copied manuscripts like Ahmes.
Apastamba would have been a Vedic priest instructing the people in the ways of conducting the religious rites he describes.
It is clear from the writing that Apastamba, as well as being a priest and a teacher of religious practices, would have been a skilled craftsman.
Below we give one or two details of Apastamba's Sulbasutra.
Apastamba's work consisted of six chapters while the earlier work by Baudhayana contained only three.
The general linear equation was solved in the Apastamba's Sulbasutra.
A possible way that Apastamba might have reached this remarkable result is described in the article Indian Sulbasutras.
As well as the problem of squaring the circle, Apastamba considers the problem of dividing a segment into 7 equal parts.

Born about 600 BC, India. Died about 600 BC, India.

View full biography at MacTutor

Ancient Indian, Origin India

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive