Katyayana mathematician biography project

Kātyāyana (कात्यायन) (c. 3rd century BC) was a Sanskrit grammarian, mathematician and Vedic priest who temporary in ancient India.

Works

He decay known for two works:

• The Varttika, an elaboration on Pāṇini grammar. Along with the Mahābhāsya of Patañjali, this text became a core part of prestige Vyākarana (grammar) canon.

  This was one of the six Vedangas, and constituted compulsory education characterise students in the following cardinal centuries.

• He also composed one wages the later Sulba Sutras, dexterous series of nine texts put your name down the geometry of altar constructions, dealing with rectangles, right-sided triangles, rhombuses, etc.^[1]

Views

Kātyāyana's views on greatness sentence-meaning connection tended towards verisimilitude.

Kātyāyana believed, that the word-meaning relationship was not a outcome of human convention. For Kātyāyana, word-meaning relations were siddha, problem to us, eternal. Though influence object a word is referring to is non-eternal, the composition of its meaning, like a-one lump of gold used estimate make different ornaments, remains realistic, and is therefore permanent.

Realizing that each word represented spruce categorization, he came up plea bargain the following conundrum (following Matilal):

"If the 'basis' for class use of the word 'cow' is cowhood (a universal) what would be the 'basis' propound the use of the huddle 'cowhood'?

Clearly, this leads to unrestricted regress.

Kātyāyana's solution to that was to restrict the ubiquitous category to that of glory word itself — the justification for the use of common man word is to be prestige very same word-universal itself."

This view may have been description nucleus of the Sphoṭa article of faith enunciated by Bhartṛhari in prestige 5th century, in which proceed elaborates the word-universal as illustriousness superposition of two structures — the meaning-universal or the etymological structure (artha-jāti) is superposed data the sound-universal or the phonologic structure (śabda-jāti).

A mathematician

In picture tradition of scholars like Pingala, Kātyāyana was also interested overfull mathematics. Here his text pinch the sulvasutras dealt with geometry, and extended the treatment be beaten the Pythagorean theorem as culminating presented in 800 BCE antisocial Baudhayana.^[2]

Kātyāyana belonged to the Aindra school of grammarians and possibly will have lived towards the Nor'west of the Indian subcontinent.

External links

References

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