Author of the Ashtadhyayi, a grammar of Sanskrit so precise it is still studied as a landmark in linguistics, roughly 2,500 years after it was written.
लगभग ४–६ठी शताब्दी ई.पू. · circa 4th-6th century BCE
Panini is generally dated to around the 4th-6th century BCE in the northwest of the subcontinent, near present-day Peshawar, though little else of his personal life is recorded with confidence.
His nearly 4,000 grammatical rules, written in a highly compressed formal notation, standardized classical Sanskrit and are still cited by modern computational linguists as an early example of a generative grammar — work that predates comparable Western linguistic formalism by over two millennia.