Bréard A. Nine Chapters on Mathematical Modernity: Essays on the Global Historical Entanglements of the Science of Numbers in China

Springer International Publishing, 2019. — xv+291 p. — (Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context). — ISBN: 978-3-319-93694-9.The book addresses for the first time the dynamics associated with the modernization of mathematics in China from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century from a transcultural global historical perspective. Rather than depict the transformations of mathematical knowledge in terms of a process of westernization, the book analyzes the complex interactions between different scientific communities and the ways in which the past, modernity, language, and mathematics were negotiated in a global context.
In each chapter, Andrea Bréard provides vivid portraits of a series of go-betweens (such as translators, educators, or state statisticians) based on a vast array of translated primary sources hitherto unavailable to a non-Chinese readership. They not only illustrate how Chinese scholars mediated between new mathematical objects and discursive modes, but also how they instrumentalized their autochthonous scientific roots in specific political and intellectual contexts. While sometimes technical in style, the book addresses all readers who are interested in the global and cultural history of science and the complexities involved in the making of universal mathematics.Visions of Antiquity
The Ellipse Seen from Nineteenth-Century China
Filling Euclid’s Gaps
Negotiating a Linguistic Space In-Between
Discourse Transformed: Changing Modes of Argumentation
Fate Calculation 算算算命命命 : The Mathematics of Divination
Data Management and Knowledge Production in Late Qing Institutions
Applied Versus Pure Mathematics
Visions of Modernity
Appendix:
A Timeline of Mathematics from the Late Ming to the People’s Republic of China
Translation of Li Shanlan’s Methods for Testing Primality (Kao shugen fa 考考考數數數根根根法法法 ), 1872
On Conics (Some Technicalities)