The Chinese roots of linear algebra
By: Roger Hart
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Baltimore, MD
Language: eng; chi
Number of pages: 286
ISBN-13: 9780801897559
Subjects: Chinese Mathematics; Linear Algebras; History; Intellectual life
Description: The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra explains the fundamentally visual way Chinese mathematicians understood and solved mathematical problems. It argues convincingly that what the West "discovered" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had already been known to the Chinese for 1,000 years.

Accomplished historian and Chinese-language scholar Roger Hart examines Nine Chapters of Mathematical Artsùthe classic ancient Chinese mathematics textùand the arcane art of fangcheng, one of the most significant branches of mathematics in Imperial China. Practiced between the first and seventeenth centuries by anonymous and most likely illiterate adepts, fangcheng involves manipulating counting rods on a counting board. It is essentially equivalent to the solution of systems of N equations in N unknowns in modern algebra, and its practice, Hart reveals, was visual and algorithmic. Fangcheng practitioners viewed problems in two dimensions as an array of numbers across counting boards. By "cross multiplying" these, they derived solutions of systems of linear equations that are not found in ancient Greek or early European mathematics. Doing so within a column equates to Gaussian elimination, while the same operation among individual entries produces determinantal-style solutions. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 262-278) and index.

In English and Chinese.