Half a millennium ago, European scholars were under some flawed impressions, including that the earth was the center of the universe (or at least the solar system, which I guess they would have called the “earth system” or something).
But if you look a bit further than our typical eurocentric history tends to, you’ll find that Nilakantha Somayaji, who was born on in India on June 14th in 1444, became a well known mathematician and astronomer who wrote a long astronomical catalog called the Tantrasamgraha in 1501. It not only pointed out that the sun was (more or less) the center of the solar system, but calculated the orbits of Mercury and Venus so accurately that nobody got closer to the right answer for centuries.
I said the sun was “more or less” the center of his solar system model because while he noted that all the planets visible in those days orbited the sun, he also suggested that whole assemblage orbited the earth. Tycho Brahe proposed the same thing many years later.
Nilakantha was also a mathematician, and worked on problems in trigonometry, algebra, and geometry — some of the problems were not yet even known in Europe. In addition to all that, he was reportedly also a gifted debater and grammarian.
His name, by the way, was Nilakantha; “Somayaji” is a title earned by someone who has performed a particular vedic ritual. Nilakantha was part of a rich tradition of scholarship in that part of the world, but it’s not as widely known as some other traditions because many (or most) of the leadiing thinkers in that time and place never wrote much at all about themselves or their own experiences. We know about Nilakantha because, for some reason, he did. And there are even a few records from others describing him, so we also know that there’s a very good chance that he lived to be over 100, even back then. Back in the 1500s that was more than twice the life expectancy of Europeans, which is the cohort we know the most about.
