Nine chapters on mathematical modernity. Essays on the global historical entanglements of the science of numbers in China (Q1667297)

Those who think that the mathematical discourse, its diffusion, and its acquisition are largely nationalistic-baggage-free, and that outbursts such as the one in Western Europe during World War I or in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are the absolute exception, will find a very powerful antidote in this book. Its subject is, put simply, the Chinese reaction, from the 19th century on, to mathematics elsewhere, and the tension between its own tradition and ``mathematical modernity'' down to the present. It covers (i) Chinese historiography, with its penchant, much like that of Soviet historiography, to emphasize that, in fact, not the Westerners who are credited with a certain discovery are responsible for it, but rather a local figure, (ii) the extreme length to which Xia Luanxiang (1823--1864) goes to emphasize the sources (traditional or borrowed from abroad) of each approach in his work on conics, (iii) Li Shanlan's (1811--1882) 1872 (incorrect) ``method of testing primality'', (iv) the initial translation of Western algebraic symbolism into a Chinese script symbolism; (v) Li Shanlan's identity (a combinatorial identity of 1867 and the interest for it in 20th-century Central Europe), (vi) the Chinese mathematics of divination (related to the \textit{Yijing} (\textit{Classic of changes}) or to other methods), (vii) statistics (before and after 1949, when an entirely new ``statistics'' was introduced top down) and the relation between pure and applied mathematics, (viii) the question when (and if) mathematical modernity arrived in China, including a (debatable) attempt to interpret Yitang Zhang's achievement within this broader history of Chinese specificity in mathematics (``Zhang's outlook remained essentially Chinese, and his scientific creativity and force of intuition, I suspect, is not unrelated to the kind of self-training he followed with the two above-mentioned books'' (a popular science book \textit{One hundred thousand whys} at age 10 and Xia Daoxing's \textit{\(\pi\) and e} during the Cultural Revolution)). That the process of modernization, of abandoning a tradition that has been long superseded, is not yet completed, can be seen from the comeback of ``National Studies'', exemplified by the fact that problems from the \textit{Nine chapters} have appeared in recent years on university entrance examinations in Hubei Province.