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"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."
"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..."
"...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...
"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...
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.
@Michael, I think the more typical way to count isomorphism classes is to weight each class by the reciprocal of the cardinality of its automorphism group. So, each cyclic group of order $N$ would be weighted by $1 / \phi(N)$, for example.
My impression, from far far far away, is that the derived category is not the best thing to look at over Q or Z. I thought that due to some badness (non-unique arrows) in derived categories, they do not behave very well for descent. Presumably, if you want to say something meaningful over Q, you would want to treat algebraic extensions of Q as well. Hence the activity in modern fancy category/topos/homotopy theory to handle things better than D(X).
Yes -- it is equivalent ("there are definitely better ways of writing property (P)"). But I wanted a statement with an asymptotic feel to it, and one could imagine variations on property (P) by allowing only some partitions. Simplicity is probably better though...