Introduction of Liu Hui


Preface:
As a Chinese, Liu Hui is not unfamiliar to me. When I was really young, my math teacher had taught me that Liu Hui is a great mathematics who has published a famous mathematical book named The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art. However, The Nine Chapter on the Mathematical Art is the only point that I know about Liu Hui so far. For American, I think people may even have never heard about Liu Hui. Therefore, all of us should know more about Liu Hui because of his great achievements.
                                                                                                                                 
Liu Hui (225-295) was an ancient Chinese mathematician in Three Kingdoms Period (220-280) of China. Since Liu Hui is a Chinese name (刘徽 in Chinese), Liu is his family name and Hui is his first name. Since his era is extremely far from now, we are unable to find more information about his personal life. What he had left for late generations was his mathematical works. In Liu Hui's life, he edited and published two famous and great mathematical books: The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art (Jiuzhang suanshu) andSea Island Mathematical Manual (Haidao suanjing), which have made great contributions to ancient mathematics in China and even all over the world. 

 There are various contributions and progress of mathematics made by Liu Hui. According to the historical records, Liu Hui was the first mathematician who had found and applied negative numbers. Also, Liu Hui used an advanced form of decimal fractions to express all his mathematical results. In Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, Liu Hui made a closed approximation of 3.141024 < π < 3.142074 to pi (π) and thought that 3.14 was good enough as the approximation of π. In addtion, he proved and applied Pythagora's Theorem which was known as Gougu Rule in China to solve problems based on right angled triangles. In Sea Island Mathematical Manual, Liu Hui edited lots of geometrical problems such as measurements of heights of a pagoda tower. 

In conclusion, Liu Hui was an outstanding mathematician and made great achievement in fields related to mathematics such as geometry and cartography. Although he did lots of mathematical works, he was humble for his work and wrote: "Let us leave the problem to whoever can tell the truth."

Sea Island Mathematical Manual
The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art
Reference

1. Liu Hui. Retrieved February 16, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Hui.
2. Liu Hui. Retrieved February 16, 2018, from http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Liu_Hui.html.
3. Liu Hui. Retrieved February 16, 2018, from http://www.famous-mathematicians.com/liu-hui/.



Comments

  1. Jane KeiserApril 5, 2018 at 2:37 PM

    Some typos:
    "great mathematics " should be "mathematician"
    "For American, " should be plural, "Americans"

    Zihan, I don't think you returned to this first post and made the edits that I asked you to in my email about your 1st blog post. It is still full of typos.

    ReplyDelete

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