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The Mathematicians PodcastAuthor: Ben Cornish
Where we explore the historical figures that count. An in-depth look at the history of mathematics, in chronological order, looking at the people, the theories, the ideas - with as fewer gaps as possible. Each episode we focus in on a single character or contribution to the history of maths and explore why it is significant, and how it evolved. Language: en Genres: History, Mathematics, Science Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Episode 59 - Varāhamihira (And Bhāskara I) - Back to School
Episode 59
Monday, 3 August, 2026
Was Varāhamihira the world's first statistician? Could a sixth-century mathematician really predict the monsoon using observational data? And how did Bhāskara I produce one of the greatest approximations to the sine function over a thousand years before modern calculators? In this episode of The Mathematicians Podcast, Benjamin Cornish explores two remarkable figures from the golden age of Indian mathematics. First, we meet Varāhamihira, author of the Bṛhat Saṃhitā and the Pañcasiddhāntikā. Discover how he preserved the Five Astronomical Schools of India, collected generations of weather observations to forecast the monsoon, classified clouds, investigated geography, gemstones and groundwater, and pioneered a surprisingly modern approach to gathering and analysing data. Then we turn to Bhāskara I, one of Aryabhata's greatest successors. His commentary preserved Aryabhata's revolutionary ideas for future generations, while his elegant rational approximation for sin(x) remains one of the most impressive achievements in early mathematics. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Support the Podcast If you enjoy the show and would like to help support future episodes, you can buy me a coffee here: https://ko-fi.com/benjamincornish ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Follow The Mathematicians Podcast Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mathematicians-pod.bsky.social ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Music The music was- "Danse Macabre - Finale" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Keywords Varāhamihira, Bhāskara I, Bhaskara I, Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Ancient Indian mathematics, History of mathematics, Indian astronomy, Pañcasiddhāntikā, Panchasiddhantika, Bṛhat Saṃhitā, Brihat Samhita, sine approximation, sin x approximation, trigonometry, statistics, weather forecasting, monsoon prediction, Gupta Empire, Ujjain, Ujjayini, mathematical history, mathematicians podcast, Benjamin Cornish, history podcast, science history, astronomy history, ancient science, Indian mathematicians. Hashtags #Mathematics #HistoryOfMathematics #IndianMathematics #Varahamihira #BhaskaraI #Aryabhata #Brahmagupta #AncientIndia #Astronomy #Trigonometry #Statistics #HistoryPodcast #SciencePodcast #STEM #MathsPodcast #TheMathematiciansPodcast
