jean - claude martzloff - a history of chinese mathematics

[...]... lot of questions now arise about this area of the history of Chinese mathematics, which at first seemed so compartmentalised, so technical, and scarcely worthy of the general interest of historians or, even less, the interest of those who study the evolution of mental attitudes After studying general aspects of Chinese mathematics in the first part of his book, J.-C Martzloff strikes an admirable balance... on the History of Chinese Mathematics in Japanese Japanese studies of the history of Chinese mathematics began somewhat belat,edly at the beginning of the 20th century44 and were often conceived not in their own right, but as an introduction to the history of Japanese autochthonous mathematics As a result, sometimes articles which appear to treat only Japanese questions also in fact touch on Chinese. .. that, since the beginning of the Meiji era, Japan, unlike China had adopted the notation and the style of Western mathematics directly, without retaining anything whatsoever of traditional Japanese mathematics In a completely different area, Takeda Kusuo and Kodama Akihito were interested in the history of the Chinese mathematical texts themselves The former established the genealogy of certain Chinese. .. For example, in a book apparently devoted solely to the history of the wasan (traditional Japanese mathematics) , Kato Heizaemon considers in detail the question of series developments in the work of Minggatu ( ?-1 764).45 In a series of articles published between 1932 and 1934 and devoted to the relationship between Seki Takakazu and Japanese mathematicians of the Osaka and Kyoto regions, Mikami analyses... mathematicians Madame Lam Lay-Yong of Singapore translated the Yang Hui suanfa (Yang Hui's Methods of Computation) (ca 1275) in and Jock Hoe, resolving the problem of translating Chinese mathematical texts in a very original way,42 translated the whole of the Siyuan yujian (Jade Mirror of the Four Origins) (1303) In order to remain faithful to the spirit of ancient Chinese texts, often obscured in translation... that a commentary was necessary? The numerical examples chosen by mathematicians to construct the gates at the four cardinal points of a Chinese town, and the calculation of the tax base constitute a precise revelation of a lost world and are useful in archaeology But beyond this, does not the mathematics developed by a generation reveal its innermost skeletal structure, much like an X-ray? What a. .. the profession of office clerk, accountant and proof-reader," Yan Dunjie stands out as one of the most solid researchers in the discipline, since he perceived the history of Chinese mathematics from a truly historical angle from a very early stage His output is even more valuable, since even today a considerable number of works are based on a fundamentally one-dimensional, anachronistic approach which,... ado, confuses mathematics and the history of mathematics In particular, Yan Dunjie was responsible for observations on the influence of the development of paper money on the mathematics of the Song and Yuan periods, on the influence of poetical terminology on the technical vocabulary of mathematics, on the mathematical notions contained in certain Chinese novels, on the relationship between mathematics. .. the universalisation of mathematics in the Far East" are still famous in Japan In the first of these, he used the text of the Jzuzhang suanshu as a source for the economic history of the Han, and in the second he compared the history of mathematics in the Japan of the Meiji era 440ya (2'), 1979 45Kat~ (l'),1969 46Mikami (7'), 193 2-1 934 47Wagner (3), 1978 48Bibliography of Mikami in Yajima ( l ) , 1953... content of Chinese mathematics has been accompanied by the realisation that, as far as results are concerned, there are numerous similarities between Chinese mathematics and other ancient and medieval mathematics For example, Pythagoras' theorem, the double-false-position rules, Hero's formulae, and Ruffini-Horner's method are found almost everywhere As far as the reasoning used to obtain these results