Pāṇini (Devanāgarī पाणिनि; IPA ) was an ancient Hindu Indian grammarian (approximately 5th century BC) who is most famous for formulating the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology known as the Aṣṭādhyāyī.

Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit is highly systematised and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root, only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. Pāṇini's rules have a reputation of perfection — that is, they perfectly describe the Sanskrit morphology, and regarded as so clear that computer scientists have made use of them to teach computers to understand Sanskrit. Pāṇini uses metarules, transformations, and recursion. In this sense Pāṇini may be considered the father of computing machines. The Backus-Naur Form or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to Pāṇini's grammar rules.

Nothing definite is known about Pāṇini's life, not even the century he lived in (he lived almost certainly after the 7th and before the 3rd century BC). According to Indian tradition, Pāṇini was born in Shalatula , near the Indus river in present-day Pakistan, and lived ca. 520–460 BC, a time probably falling within the late Vedic period: Pāṇini has a few special rules, marked chandasi ("in the hymns") to account for forms in the Vedic scriptures that had fallen out of use in the spoken language of his time, indicating that Vedic Sanskrit was already archaic, but still a comprehensible dialect.

Deities referred to in Pāṇini's work include Vasudeva (4.3.98). The concept of Dharma is attested in his example sentence (4.4.41) dharmam carati "he observes the law".

An important hint for the dating of Pāṇini is the occurrence of yavan- "Ionian, Greek" in 4.1.49, where the formation of the word yavanānī (either "Greek woman", or "Greek script") is discussed. It is not known whether Pāṇini himself used writing for the composition of his work. Some people argue that a work of such complexity would have been impossible to compile without written notes, while others allow for the possibility that Pāṇini may have composed it with the help of a group of students whose memories served him as 'notepads'. Writing appears in India in the form of the Brahmi script in the 5th century BC, so that for some estimates of Pāṇini's lifetime, he could well have known and used a writing system.

See also

• Indian mathematicians

External links

• Pāṇini's Ashtadhyayi in ITRANSliteration and devanagari script
• Software based on Pāṇini's Sanskrit Grammar
• the Pāṇini entry at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
• The Influence of Panini on Indian Culture by Shaina Bal