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Chinese mathematics Wikipedia

Chinese mathematics

Knowledge of Chinese mathematics before 100 BC is somewhat fragmentary, but there are elements that seem consistent. For one Chinese mathematics in early times was strongly related to astronomy and perfecting the calendar. Hence many of the earliest texts also deal with astronomy. For another it's view of "proof" was slightly different. Many works simply listed equation and a proof was hinted at rather than shown. In other cases a proof was shown, but declared to be an established method after some fashion. This makes dating the use of certain mathematical methods in Chinese history problematic and disputed. Arguments for and against the Chinese discovering Pythagorean theorem, for example, have at times been heated.

The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art (九章算術) is a Chinese mathematics book, probably composed in the 1st century AD, but perhaps as early as 200 BC.

Most scholars believe that Chinese mathematics and the mathematics of the ancient Mediterranean world had developed more or less independently up to the time when the Nine Chapters reached its final form.

The Suan shu shu is an ancient Chinese text on mathematics approximately seven thousand characters in length, written on 190 bamboo strips. It was discovered together with other writings in 1983 when archaeologists opened a tomb at Zhangjiashan in Hubei province. From documentary evidence this tomb is known to have been closed in 186 BC, early in the Western Han dynasty. While its relationship to the Nine Chapters is still under discussion by scholars, some of its contents are clearly paralleled there. The text of the Suan shu shu is however much less systematic than the Nine Chapters; and appears to consist of a number of more or less independent short sections of text drawn from a number of sources.

In the third century Liu Hui wrote his commentary on the Nine Chapters and also wrote Haidao suanjing which dealt with using Pythagorean theorem, which in China was known as Gougu theorem, to measure the size of things. In the fifth century the manual called "Zhang Qiujian suanjing" discussed linear and quadratic equations. By this point the Chinese had the concept of negative numbers and arguably had the concept of zero. By the Tang Dynasty study of math was fairly standard in the great schools.

Things grew quiet for a time until the thirteenth century Renaissance of Chinese math. This saw Chinese mathematicians solving equations with methods Europe would not know until the eighteenth century. The high point of this era came with Zhu Shijie's two books Suanxue qimeng and the Siyuan yujian. In one case he reportedly gave a method equivalent to Gauss's pivotal condensation. He also worked with a form of Pascal triangle in the thirteenth century, but called it "the ancient method of powers up to the eighth."

However after the overthrow of the Yuan China became suspicious of knowledge it used. The Ming turned away from math and physics in favor of botany and pharmacology. A revival of math in China began in the late nineteenth century, but this would largely be based on Western modes or knowledge.

Last Modified:   2005-11-04