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The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art

Ancient Chinese mathematics text

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Entries in the book usually take the form of a statement of a problem, followed by the statement of the solution and an explanation of the procedure that led to the solution. These were commented on by Liu Hui in the 3rd century.

The book was later included in the early Tang collection, the Ten Computational Canons.

History

Original book

The full title of The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art appears on two bronze standard measures which are dated to 179 CE, but there is speculation that the same book existed beforehand under different titles.

The title is also mentioned in volume 24 of the Book of the Later Han as one of the books studied by Ma Xu (馬續). Based on the known dates of his younger brother Ma Rong (馬融) this places the date of composition no later than 93 CE.

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 method of chapter 7 was not found in Europe until the 13th century, and the method of chapter 8 uses Gaussian elimination before Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). There is also the mathematical proof given in the treatise for the Pythagorean theorem. The influence of The Nine Chapters greatly assisted the development of ancient mathematics in the regions of Korea and Japan. Its influence on mathematical thought in China persisted until the Qing dynasty era.

Liu Hui wrote a detailed commentary in 263. He analyses the procedures of The Nine Chapters step by step, in a manner which is clearly designed to give the reader confidence that they are reliable, although he is not concerned to provide formal proofs in the Euclidean manner. Liu's commentary is of great mathematical interest in its own right. Liu credits the earlier mathematicians Zhang Cang (fl. 165 BCE – d. 142 BCE) and Geng Shouchang (fl. 75 BCE – 49 BCE) (see armillary sphere) with the initial arrangement and commentary on the book, yet Han dynasty records do not indicate the names of any authors of commentary, as they are not mentioned until the 3rd century

The Nine Chapters is an anonymous work, and its origins are not clear. Until recent years, there was no substantial evidence of related mathematical writing that might have preceded it, with the exception of mathematical work by those such as Jing Fang (78–37 BCE), Liu Xin (d. 23), and Zhang Heng (78–139) and the geometry clauses of the Mozi of the 4th century BCE. This is no longer the case. The Suàn shù shū (算數書) or Writings on Reckonings 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 in Hubei province. It is among the corpus of texts known as the Zhangjiashan Han bamboo texts. From documentary evidence this tomb is known to have been closed in 186 BCE, 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 Suàn shù shū 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. The Zhoubi Suanjing, a mathematics and astronomy text, was also compiled during the Han, and was even mentioned as a school of mathematics in and around 180 CE by Cai Yong.

Western translations

The title of the book has been translated in a wide variety of ways.

In 1852, Alexander Wylie referred to it as Arithmetical Rules of the Nine Sections.

With only a slight variation, the Japanese historian of mathematics Yoshio Mikami shortened the title to Arithmetic in Nine Sections.

David Eugene Smith, in his History of Mathematics (Smith 1923), followed the convention used by Yoshio Mikami.

Several years later, George Sarton took note of the book, but only with limited attention and only mentioning the usage of red and black rods for positive and negative numbers.

In 1959, Joseph Needham and Wang Ling (historian) translated Jiu Zhang Suan shu as The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art for the first time.

Later in 1994, Lam Lay Yong used this title in her overview of the book, as did other mathematicians including John N. Crossley and Anthony W.-C Lun in their translation of Li Yan and Du Shiran's Chinese Mathematics: A Concise History (Li and Du 1987).

Afterwards, the name The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art stuck and became the standard English title for the book.

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