CodeBorg wrote:Everything we do comes down to math, the universal language common to all science, music, culture, industry and understanding. Who would you vote for as the Greatest Mathematician of All Time?
You forgot Aryabhatta.
Aryabhatta was born in 476 A.D. at Ashmaka in what today is the Indian state of Kerala. He was sent to the University of Nalanda as a boy to study astronomy. His Heliocentric theory of gravitation preceded Copernicus by a thousand years. In the 5th century, Aryabhatta becanme the first person to put forth the theory that Earth is a sphere.
Aryabhatta's main work is known as the Aryabhattiya. It was so significant that it was translated into Latin in the 13th century. That's how European mathematicians learned Aryabhatta's method of calculating the areas of triangles, volumes of spheres, and square and cube roots.
Aryabhatta also wrote about eclipses and the Sun being the source of moonlight a millennium before Copernicus and Galileo.
In mathematics, Aryabhatta's contribution was equally valuable. He gave the value of pi as 3.1416 claiming, for the first time, that it was an approximation. He was the first mathematician to give what later came on to be called the 'table of the sines'.
The Indian mathmatecians invented zero as well, though it is debated by some. A brief history can be found
Here
I was only trying to stimulate the creation of a math forum... 
Thursday morning - only one more day and it's....Friday!
