Baudhāyana
A figure from the books
#Baudhayana
Baudhāyana · c. 800–500 BCE
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Geometry and ritual mathematics — author, or authoring school, of the first of the Śulbasūtras, the "rules of the cord".
“The first mathematics in this book was built kneeling in the dirt with a rope and pegs, by men who never signed their work and never proved a theorem — and their unsigned, unproven geometry was correct to a few parts in a million.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“Because the gods' altars had to be exactly right, the priests of the fire ritual worked out real geometry — including the theorem we call Pythagoras's, written down and used in India before Pythagoras was born, and a value of √2 correct to five decimal places.”
From the book
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