Virasena

Who is Virasena?

Āchārya Virasena was an 8th-century Indian mathematician and Jain philosopher and scholar. He was a student of the Jain sage Elāchārya. He is also known to be a famous orator and an accomplished poet. His most reputed work is the Jain treatise Dhavala. Late Dr. Hiralal Jain places the completion of this treatise in 816 AD.

Virasena was a noted mathematician. He gave the derivation of the volume of a frustum by a sort of infinite procedure. He worked with the concept of ardhaccheda: the number of times a number could be divided by 2; effectively logarithms to base 2. He also worked with logarithms in base 3 and base 4.

Virasena gave the approximate formula C = 3d + /113 to relate the circumference of a circle, C, to its diameter, d. For large values of d, this gives the approximation π ≈ 355/113 = 3.14159292..., which is more accurate than the approximation π ≈ 3.1416 given by Aryabhata in the Aryabhatiya.