You’re listening to “Scientific Giants Who Changed Our Understanding of the World We Live In.” Each episode stands beside one mind and follows a thread of curiosity until it ties to the world we inhabit. Today we travel to Gupta‑era India, to a city on the Ganges known to the texts as Kusumapura—often identified with Pāṭaliputra, near today’s Patna—where a young scholar wrote the sky into verse and taught generations to think with numbers that could be carried in the mouth. His name is Aryabhata. By his own reckoning he is twenty‑three when he fixes his epoch and finishes a slim book that refuses to sprawl. It is not a treatise in the style of Euclid, stepping carefully from axiom to proposition; it is a string of verses you are meant to remember. The book is called the Āryabhaṭīya, and because it is short, and because it is in meter, and because ...