A monumental accomplishment in the history of non-Western mathematics, 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 Arts―the classic ancient Chinese mathematics text―and 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.

Mathematicians and historians of mathematics and science will find in The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra new ways to conceptualize the intellectual development of linear algebra.

About the Author

Roger Hart is Director of the Confucius Institute and an associate professor of history at Texas Southern University. He has received fellowships from ACLS, NEH, and Mellon. Previous appointments include Seoul National University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Chicago, Institute for Advanced Study, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Harvard. He is author of The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra, also published by Johns Hopkins.

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