From India
Pingala
His Chandahshastra counts the rhythms of Sanskrit verse as patterns of short and long syllables, an early cousin of binary numbers.
Later commentators such as Virahanka, Hemachandra and Halayudha drew from it what we call Fibonacci numbers and Pascal’s triangle.
Rhythms of 1, 2, 3, … beats
No portrait of Pingala survives, so we show the mathematics instead.
Where you’ll meet Pingala here
They turn up beside problems and lessons on these topics.
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Bhaskara II
He called his arithmetic book Lilavati; a legend says it was written for his daughter. It teaches through puzzles about bees, peacocks and pearls.
In his Bijaganita he solved x² − 61y² = 1, whose smallest answer has a 10-digit x, using the cyclic chakravala method.
Smallest solution: x = 1766319049, y = 226153980
No portrait of Bhaskara II survives, so we show the mathematics instead.