Story
Baudhayana was a Vedic scholar whose Baudhayana Sulba Sutra is one of the oldest known texts on geometry. Written as practical rules for constructing yajna altars of exact shapes and areas, it contains remarkably precise mathematics.
Key contributions
- Stated the relation between the sides and the diagonal of a rectangle — the result later known as the Pythagorean theorem
- Gave an approximation of √2 accurate to five decimal places
- Described methods for squaring the circle and converting one shape into another of equal area