India

Indian mathematics can be traced back to around 600 BC. A number of Vedic manuscripts contain early work on arithmetic, permutations and combinations, the theory of numbers and the extraction of square roots.
Around 250 BC King Ashoka, ruler of most of India, became the first Buddhist monarch. His conversion was celebrated by the construction of many pillars carved with his edicts. Some of these Ashoka columns contain the earliest known appearance of what would eventually become our Hindu–Arabic numerals. The Nepalese stamp shows the Ashoka column in Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha. Thus, the Hindu number system used the same ten digits in a place-value system in which the position of each digit indicates its value. This enables calculations to be carried out column by column.
The first outstanding Indian mathematicians of the first millennium AD was Aryabhata (b. 476), who gave the first systematic treatment of ‘Diophantine equations’ – algebraic equations for which we seek solutions in integers. He also presented rules for calculating the sum of an arithmetic progression and for the sums of the first few natural numbers and of their squares and cubes, and obtained the value 3.1416 for pi. The first Indian space satellite was named Aryabhata in his honour.

In later years Indian mathematicians and astronomers constructed magnificent observatories, such as the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur. Consisting of fourteen massive instruments for measuring astronomical data, it includes the ninety-foot Samrat Yantra, the world’s largest sundial.
[India 1947, 1975, 2003; Jaipur 1947; Mauritius 1980; Nepal 1996]