The Evolution of Mathematics in Ancient China

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents a talk with Joseph Dauben on the history of early mathematical thought and its applications in ancient China.

The history of ancient Chinese mathematics and its applications has been greatly stimulated in the past few decades by remarkable archaeological discoveries of texts from the pre-Qin and later periods make it possible to study in detail mathematical material from the time at which it was written. By examining the recent Warring States, Qin and Han bamboo mathematical texts currently being conserved and studied at Tsinghua University and Peking University in Beijing, the Yuelu Academy in Changsha, and the Hubei Museum in Wuhan, Professor Dauben will shed new light on the history of early mathematical thought and its applications in ancient China. He will also discuss the development of techniques and justifications given for the problems that were a growing part of the corpus, and which eventually culminated in the comprehensive Nine Chapters on the Art of Mathematics.

Joseph W. Dauben is Distinguished Professor of History and History of Science, Herbert H. Lehman College, and professor of history in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. He received the 2012 Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Prize for History of Mathematics, conferred by the American Mathematical Society only once every four years in recognition of a career of outstanding contributions to the history of mathematics. Professor Dauben is a membre effectif of the International Academy of History of Science and a corresponding member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He has been editor of Historia Mathematica, an international journal for the history of mathematics, and chairman of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics. He is the author of Georg Cantor, His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite and Abraham Robinson: The Creation of Nonstandard Analysis,a Personal and Mathematical Odyssey. Professor Dauben received his PhD from Harvard University. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and Clare Hall (Cambridge), and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Senior ACLS Fellowship. He is an honorary member of the Institute for History of Natural Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he was the Zhu Kezhen Visiting Professor in spring of 2005.

Cosponsored with the Department of the History of Science