Timeline for Mathematical research published in the form of poems
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 8, 2014 at 9:15 | comment | added | Willie Wong | @Idear: only your example 1 has anything close to foot prosody. All the other examples are in standard classical literary prose; they are not even regulated in the sense of the quote by Marty. The demonstration for "how to calculate area", for example, is not "colloquial". But it is so in the same way that modern mathematical proofs are not colloquial: it has omitted steps, uses jargon and symbols (areas are named and "colored" instead of the modern labeling by roman letters). Heck, it even ends with "the result obviously follows". | |
| Jan 8, 2014 at 6:10 | history | edited | wonderich | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 8, 2014 at 6:07 | comment | added | wonderich | [foot (prosody) 韻腳]{en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(prosody)} and the sentences alignments are the way I judge those examples (especially for The Mathematical Classic of Sunzi) as poetic. If you dislike this way specifically for those examples; and you like to DEFINE the English poems for Chinese text, you are welcome to have what you define. Though there is ambiguity how you translate between the twos. My post is simple enough just to give a flavor how the Chinese text in mathematics can be very different from the usual text. ps. I change most of to some. | |
| Jan 8, 2014 at 5:56 | comment | added | wonderich | The posts and picture/resources that I found is pretty bad, unfortunately I could only found the scanned from Wikipedia. I am not sure what do you define poems: in the English sense or in the Chinese literature sense 中文. The posts are probably not written in terms of poems of Chinese literature sense (it is not 唐詩 宋詞 or 元曲); but it resembles a way of writing different from the usual speaking language(people do not speak this way, with foot prosody). If "the expert" likes to call it regulated proses than the poems; fine, it is up to you. | |
| Jan 8, 2014 at 5:53 | history | edited | wonderich | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 7, 2014 at 4:06 | comment | added | Marty | "The English examples ("The Kiss Precise" etc.) are clearly poems. I hope people won't start thinking that scanned Chinese examples are similar to those by any stretch of the imagination. I'm sure you've looked at things like the Joseph Needham, and maybe it would help to bring in sources that are more scholarly than wikipedia." | |
| Jan 7, 2014 at 4:05 | comment | added | Marty | "Many of Confucius' aphorisms and sayings sound like this, but no one would call those poetry. Regulated prose is a dominant characteristic of ancient Chinese writing and found throughout the development of the essay form in Chinese, and it is very wrong to call it "poetry" (because the Chinese do have poetry qua poetry), and very wrong to claim that it is specific to mathematical treatises..." | |
| Jan 7, 2014 at 4:05 | comment | added | Marty | "...I'd say that the additional example from Sun Zi is "regulated prose"; that is to say, it is "high" literary Chinese written with attention to parallelism, tonality, parts of speech, and other aesthetic conventions that one also finds in poetry. Prose written this way is considered elegant and sophisticated. The fact that Sun Zi's prose is regulated (using a fixed number of characters for each line, making the lines rhyme where possible but following no particular pattern of rhymes) makes the text easier to read (and remember) for the ancient reader, and the author seem more learned... | |
| Jan 7, 2014 at 4:05 | comment | added | Marty | "Happy New Year! Well the post is fascinating, but completely wrong. The first two examples (the first two pictures) are actually the same page of the same book (the Nine Chapters)--it's just that one is a more modern facsimile of the manuscript--I am not sure why the person couldn't supply more examples if he wanted to claim that "almost all of Chinese math is poetry"? But the examples they gave (including the "additional" ones in the responses) are not poetry... | |
| Jan 7, 2014 at 4:04 | comment | added | Marty | I asked a colleague -- an expert in Chinese poetry -- about this, and his response is below... | |
| Jan 1, 2014 at 5:44 | comment | added | Benjamin Dickman | @Idear I cannot say that the sentence on the left being somewhat poetic is enough to claim that this constitutes mathematics as poetry. | |
| Dec 31, 2013 at 2:17 | comment | added | wonderich | @ Benjamin Dickman, the sentence on the left is poetic. (Perhaps not yet a complete poem.) @ Marty: No, the answer is not false. Here are some examples for clarification: The Mathematical Classic of Sunzi, on Chinese remainder theorem: 孫子定理, 韓信點兵, e.g. 1: 有物不知其數，三三數之剩二，五五數之剩三，七七數之剩二。問物幾何？ e.g. 2: 三人同行七十希，五樹梅花廿一支，七子團圓正半月，除百零五使得知. These are definitely written in terms of poems. | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 18:54 | comment | added | Marty | I think this answer is just false. Neither the Nine Chapters nor the Suan Shu Shu ("Book on Numbers and Computation") are written as poems. If you want to look towards India, however, you'll find much better examples. | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 6:22 | comment | added | Benjamin Dickman | What about, for example, the last theorem posted here (勾股定理) makes it qualify as poetry specifically? | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 0:39 | history | edited | wonderich | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
add the name of the book "The Arithmetical Classic of the Gnomon and the Circular Paths of Heaven."
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| Dec 30, 2013 at 0:34 | comment | added | wonderich | Perhaps(?) one of the debated reasons that why it is hard to further develop the old Chinese mathematics into a more scientific/algebraic form in the past ancient eras, is due to the writings/paragraphs are too poetic. | |
| S Dec 30, 2013 at 0:29 | history | answered | wonderich | CC BY-SA 3.0 | |
| S Dec 30, 2013 at 0:29 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by wonderich |