Lilavati
Lilavati (also Leelavati) was Bhaskara's (Bhaskaracharya) excellent treatise on Mathematics. The name comes from his daughter Lilavati. From casting her horoscope, he discovered that the auspicious time for her wedding would be a particular hour on a certain day, else she would never get married. He placed a cup with a small hole at the bottom of the vessel filled with water, arranged so that the cup would sink at the beginning of the propitious hour. When everything was ready and the cup was placed in the vessel, Lilavati suddenly out of curiosity bent over the vessel and a pearl from her dress fell into the cup and blocked the hole in it. The lucky hour passed without the cup sinking. Bhaskaracharya then wrote the work on mathematics with her name as consolation for her. The book itself contains thirteen chapters, mainly definitions, arithmetical terms, interest computation, arithmetical and geometrical progressions, plane geometry, solid geometry, the shadow of the gnomon, the kuttaka - a method to solve indeterminate equations, and combinations. The word Lilavati itself means beautiful or one possessing beauty (lila-beautiful, vati-female possessing the quality). Lilavati includes a number of methods of computing numbers such as multiplications, squares, progressions, with examples of kings and elephants, objects which a common man could understand. His conclusion to Lilavati states:
Joy and happiness is indeed ever increasing in this world for those who have Lilavati clasped to their throats, decorated as the members are with neat reduction of fractions, multiplication and involution, pure and perfect as are the solutions, and tasteful as is the speech which is exemplified.
See Also
Bhaskara II
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