// minds behind maths

Pingala

c. 300 BCE · Combinatorics, prosody

Author of the Chandahshastra, a treatise on Sanskrit prosody. In analysing the patterns of short and long syllables in poetic metre, Pingala described a binary representation of numbers and related combinatorial structures — ideas that prefigure the binary system underlying modern computing. As later elaborated by his 10th-century commentator Halayudha, Pingala's method of counting these patterns forms the Meru-prastara (the 'Staircase of Mount Meru') — the array of binomial coefficients now widely known as Pascal's triangle, which gives the coefficients in the cube and binomial expansions in the algebra section.

Source: Wikipedia — Pascal's triangle

Formulas that trace back to Pingala