- Lived:
- 14 June 1444 – c. 1544-45 · born at Tṛkkaṇṭiyūr (Trikkantiyur, near Tirur) on the Nila river, Kerala, and worked there all his life — a working astronomer, by the tradition's account, for some eight decades
- Field:
- astronomy and mathematics — third generation of the Kerala school founded by Mādhava
- The Big Idea:
- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn do not circle the Earth; they circle the Sun, which circles the Earth. His Tantrasaṅgraha of 1500 laid out that partly heliocentric solar system — structurally the same arrangement Tycho Brahe would make famous in Europe — before Tycho's grandparents had met.
- In their words:
- "What was once correct does not stay correct: computation drifts from the sky as ages pass, and so in every age the constants must be fixed afresh by observation." (the central rule of his Jyotirmīmāṃsā, c. 1504, in our close paraphrase)
- If you remember one thing:
- A Kerala village astronomer, arguing respectfully with a textbook a thousand years old, redrew the solar system half a century before Copernicus published, got the inner planets more nearly right than anyone on earth until Kepler — and then wrote a book insisting that his own system, too, would someday need correcting.