Four Vedas

Division of the Vedas :-
- Rigveda
- Yajurveda
- Sama-Veda
- Atharva-Veda


         The Rigved is the oldest extant Indic text. It is a collection of 1,028 Vedic Sanskrit hymns and 10,600 verses in all, organized into ten books. The hymns are dedicated to Rigvedic deities.The books were composed by poets from different priestly groups over a period of several centuries, commonly dated to the period of roughly the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE  in the Punjab.


       The Yajurveda is the Yajurveda Samhita consists of archaic prose mantras and also in part of verses borrowed and adapted from the Rigveda.
      Its purpose was practical, in that each mantra must accompany an action in sacrifice but, unlike the Samaveda, it was compiled to apply to all sacrificial rites.There are two major groups of recensions of this Veda, known as the "Black" (Krishna) and "White" (Shukla) Yajurveda (Krishna and Shukla Yajurveda respectively). While White Yajurveda separates the Samhita from its Brahmana (the Shatapatha Brahmana), the e Black Yajurveda intersperses the Samhita with Brahmana commentary. Of the Black Yajurveda four major recensions survive (Maitrayani, Katha, Kapisthala-Katha, Taittiriya).


    The Samaveda consists of 1549 stanzas, taken almost entirely (except for 78 stanzas) from the Rigveda.Like the Rigvedic stanzas in the Yajurveda, the Samans have been changed and adapted for use in singing. Some of the Rigvedic verses are repeated more than once. Including repetitions, there are a total of 1875 verses numbered in the Samaveda recension translated by Griffith. Two major recensions remain today, the Kauthuma/Ranayaniya and the Jaiminiya.


      The Artharvaveda is the text 'belonging to the Atharvan and Angirasa poets. It has 760 hymns, and about 160 of the hymns are in common with the Rigveda Most of the verses are metrical, but some sections are in prose. It was compiled around 900 BCE, although some of its material may go back to the time of the Rigveda, and some parts of the Atharva-Veda are older than the Rig-Veda though not in linguistic form.


   Unlike the other three Vedas, the Atharvanaveda has less connection with sacrifice. Its first part consists chiefly of spells and incantations, concerned with protection against demons and disaster, spells for the healing of diseases, for long life and for various desires or aims in life.


The second part of the text contains speculative and philosophical hymns.

zero

Aryabhatta (origin of zero):-


Aryabhatta (476-550 A.D.), one of the world’s greatest mathematician-astronomer .


 It contains mathematical and astronomical hypothesis that have been discovered to be quite accurate in contemporary mathematics. For example, he wrote that if 4 is added to 100 and then multiplied by 8 then added to 62,000 then divided by 20,000 the answer will be equal to the circumference of a circle of diameter twenty thousand. This calculates to 3.1416 close to the actual value Pi (3.14159). But his greatest donation has to be zero, known as the "Shunya" in his times. His other works include theorems on trigonometry, arithmetic, algebra, quadratic equations and the sine table.
The place-value system, first seen in the 3rd century Bakhshali Manuscript, was clearly in place in his work. While he did not use a symbol for zero, the French mathematician Georges Ifrah explains that knowledge of zero was implicit in Aryabhata's place-value system as a place holder for the powers of ten with null coefficients.
However, Aryabhata did not use the Brahmi numerals. Continuing the Sanskritic tradition from Vedic times, he used letters of the alphabet to denote numbers, expressing quantities, such as the table of sines in a mnemonic form.