Pingala - Indian poet and mathematician

Pingala was an ancient Indian poet and mathematician who lived around 300 BCE. Pingala is the author of the Chandaḥśāstra, the earliest known Sanskrit treatise on prosody. Prosody is concerned with elements of speech — the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech — provides important information beyond a sentence's literal word meaning.

Pingala presents the first known description of a binary numeral system. He described the binary numeral system in connection with the listing of Vedic meters with short and long syllables. Pingala was the first to use the zero as a notational symbol, although its use as a numerical value came about six or seven centuries later.

In Chandaḥśāstra, he analyzed Sanskrit poetry mathematically. It also contained the first known explanations of binary numbers, Fibonacci numbers and Pascal’s triangle.
Pingala (c. 200 BC) - Indian poet and mathematician