Top 10 Indian Mathematicians and their Contributions

It is no doubt that the world today is greatly indebted to the contributions made by Indian mathematicians. One of the most important contribution made by them was the introduction of decimal system as well as the invention of zero. Here are some the famous Indian mathematicians dating back from Indus Valley civilization and Vedas to Modern times.

1. Aryabhata

Aryabhata worked on the place value system using letters to signify numbers and stating qualities. He discovered the position of nine planets and stated that these planets revolve around the sun. He also stated the correct number of days in a year that is 365. 

2. Brahmagupta

The most significant contribution of Brahmagupta was the introduction of zero(0) to the mathematics which stood for “nothing”.

3. Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan is one of the celebrated Indian mathematicians. His important contributions to the field include Hardy-Ramanujan-Littlewood circle method in number theory, Roger-Ramanujan’s identities in partition of numbers, work on algebra of inequalities, elliptic functions, continued fractions, partial sums and products of hypergeometric series.

4. P.C. Mahalanobis

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis is the founder of Indian Statistical Institute as well as the National Sample Surveys for which he gained international recognition.

5. C.R. Rao

Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, popularly known as C R Rao is a well known statistician, famous for his “theory of estimation”.

6. D. R. Kaprekar

D. R. Kaprekar discovered several results in number theory, including a class of numbers and a constant named after him. Without any formal mathematical education he published extensively and was very well known in recreational mathematics cricle.

7. Harish Chandra

Harish Chandra is famously known for infinite dimensional group representation theory.

8. Satyendranath Bose

Known for his collaboration with Albert Einstein. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate.

9. Bhāskara

Bhāskara was the one who declared that any number divided by zero is infinity and that the sum of any number and infinity is also infinity. He is also famous for his book “Siddhanta Siromani”.

10. Narendra Karmarkar

Narendra Karmarkar is known for his Karmarkar’s algorithm. He is listed as an highly cited researcher by Institute for Scientific Information.