| Document Type
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BL
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| Record Number
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848061
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| Main Entry
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Hart, Roger, (Roger Preston)
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| Title & Author
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The Chinese roots of linear algebra /\ Roger Hart.
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| Publication Statement
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Baltimore, MD :: Johns Hopkins University Press,, 2011.
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| Series Statement
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The history of mathematics
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| Page. NO
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xiii, 286 pages :: illustrations ;; 24 cm
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| ISBN
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0801897556
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: 9780801897559
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| Bibliographies/Indexes
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Includes bibliographical references (pages 262-278) and index.
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| Contents
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Introduction -- Preliminaries -- The sources: written records of early Chinese Mathematics -- Excess and deficit -- Fangcheng, Chapter 8 of the Nine Chapters -- The Fangcheng procedure in Modern Mathematiecal Terms -- The well problem -- Evidence of early determinantal solutions -- Conclusions.
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| Abstract
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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.
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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.
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| Subject
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Algebras, Linear-- History.
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| Subject
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Mathematics, Chinese-- History.
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Algebras, Linear.
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Intellectual life.
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Lineare Algebra.
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Lineare Algebra.
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| Subject
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Mathematics, Chinese.
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Mathematik.
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China, Intellectual life.
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| Subject
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China.
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| Subject
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China.
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China.
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| Dewey Classification
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512.50951
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| LC Classification
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QA27.C5H37 2011
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