27-year-old Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge university solved a 2500-year-old Sanskrit grammar problem

Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion

The grammatical problem that has perplexed scholars since the 5th century BC

Panini’s grammar, known as the Astadhyayi, relied on a system that functioned like an algorithm

Mr Rajpopat rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarule

Mr Rajpopat rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarule

Mr Rajpopat found Panini’s “language machine” produced grammatically correct words