Madhava of Sangamagrama

Madhava of Sangamagrama (c. 1340-1425) was an Indian mathematician and astronomer working in the Kerala region of southern India, regarded as the founder of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. He developed infinite series expansions for trigonometric functions including sine, cosine and arctangent, using them to compute increasingly accurate approximations of pi, work that anticipated key techniques of the calculus developed independently in Europe roughly two and a half centuries later by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. None of Madhava's own original writings survive directly; his results are known chiefly through the works of later Kerala school mathematicians who credited him explicitly. Despite predating the European development of calculus by centuries, his contributions remained largely unknown outside a regional Indian mathematical tradition until relatively recent historical scholarship drew wider attention to them.