17 Facts About Surya Siddhanta

1.

The Surya Siddhanta describes rules to calculate the motions of various planets and the moon relative to various constellations, diameters of various planets, and calculates the orbits of various astronomical bodies.

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2.

The Surya Siddhanta text is composed of verses made up of two lines, each broken into two halves, or pads, of eight syllables each.

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3.

The Surya Siddhanta has the largest number of commentators among all the astronomical texts written in India.

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4.

One of the evidence for the Surya Siddhanta being a living text is the work of medieval Indian scholar Utpala, who cites and then quotes ten verses from a version of Surya Siddhanta, but these ten verses are not found in any surviving manuscripts of the text.

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5.

Surya Siddhanta is a text on astronomy and time keeping, an idea that appears much earlier as the field of Jyotisha of the Vedic period.

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6.

For example, Surya Siddhanta provides table of sines function which parallel the Hipparchian table of chords, though the Indian calculations are more accurate and detailed.

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7.

The Indian mathematical astronomers, in their texts such as the Surya Siddhanta, developed other linear measures of angles, made their calculations differently, "introduced the versine, which is the difference between the radius and cosine, and discovered various trigonometrical identities".

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8.

The Surya Siddhanta was one of the two books in Sanskrit that were translated into Arabic in the later half of the eighth century during the reign of Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur.

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9.

Surya Siddhanta was one of the two books in Sanskrit translated into Arabic in the later half of the eighth century during the reign of Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur.

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10.

Contents of the Surya Siddhanta is written in classical Indian poetry tradition, where complex ideas are expressed lyrically with a rhyming meter in the form of a terse shloka.

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11.

The Surya Siddhanta text has survived since the ancient times, has been the best known and the most referred astronomical text in the Indian tradition.

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12.

Fourteen chapters of the Surya Siddhanta are as follows, per the much cited Burgess translation:.

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13.

Author of Surya Siddhanta defines time as of two types: the first which is continuous and endless, destroys all animate and inanimate objects and second is time which can be known.

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14.

Surya Siddhanta asserts that there are two pole stars, one each at north and south celestial pole.

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15.

Surya Siddhanta provides methods of calculating the sine values in chapter 2.

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16.

Surya Siddhanta calculates the solar year to be 365 days 6 hours 12 minutes and 36.

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17.

Surya Siddhanta was one of the two books in Sanskrit translated into Arabic during the reign of 'Abbasid caliph al-Mansur.

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