Chitrabhanu (; ) was a mathematician of the
Kerala school and a student of
Nilakantha Somayaji. He was a
Nambudiri
The Nambudiri (), also transliterated as Nampoothiri, Nambūdiri, Namboodiri, Nampoothiri, and Nampūtiri, are a Malayali Brahmin caste, native to what is now the state of Kerala, India, where they constituted part of the traditional feudal e ...
brahmin from the town of Covvaram near present day
Trissur
Thrissur (), formerly Trichur, also known by its historical name Thrissivaperur, is a city and the headquarters of the Thrissur district in Kerala, India. It is the third largest urban agglomeration in Kerala after Kochi and Kozhikode, and t ...
. He is noted for a , a concise astronomical manual, dated to 1530, an
algebra
Algebra () is one of the broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics.
Elementary ...
ic treatise, and a commentary on a poetic text.
Nilakantha and he were both teachers of
Shankara Variyar.
Contributions
He gave integer solutions to 21 types of systems of two
simultaneous Diophantine equations in two unknowns.
[.] These types are all the possible pairs of equations of the following seven forms:
[.]
For each case, Chitrabhanu gave an explanation and justification of his rule as well as an example. Some of his explanations are algebraic, while others are geometric.
References
Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics
15th-century births
16th-century deaths
16th-century Indian mathematicians
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