Li Shanlan (李善蘭,

courtesy name A courtesy name (), also known as a style name, is a name bestowed upon one at adulthood in addition to one's given name. This practice is a tradition in the East Asian cultural sphere, including China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.Ulrich Theob ...

: Renshu 壬叔,

art name An art name (pseudonym or pen name), also known by its native names ''hào'' (in Mandarin), ''gō'' (in Japanese), ''ho'' (in Korean), and ''tên hiệu'' (in Vietnamese), is a professional name used by East Asian artists, poets and writers. The ...

: Qiuren 秋紉) (1810 – 1882) was a Chinese mathematician of the

Qing Dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-spea ...

. A native of

Haining () is a county-level city in Zhejiang Province, China, and under the jurisdiction of Jiaxing. It is in the south side of Yangtze River Delta, and in the north of Zhejiang. It is to the southwest of central Shanghai, and east of Hangzhou, the p ...

Zhejiang Zhejiang ( or , ; , Chinese postal romanization, also romanized as Chekiang) is an East China, eastern, coastal Provinces of China, province of the People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Hangzhou, and other notable citie ...

, he was fascinated by mathematics since childhood, beginning with the ''

Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art ''The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art'' () is a Chinese mathematics book, composed by several generations of scholars from the 10th–2nd century BCE, its latest stage being from the 2nd century CE. This book is one of the earliest su ...

''. He eked out a living by being a private tutor for some years before fleeing to Shanghai in 1852 to evade the

Taiping Rebellion The Taiping Rebellion, also known as the Taiping Civil War or the Taiping Revolution, was a massive rebellion and civil war that was waged in China between the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Han, Hakka-led Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. It laste ...

. There he collaborated with Alexander Wylie, Joseph Edkins and others to translate many Western mathematical works into Chinese, including ''Elements of Analytical Geometry and of the Differential and Integral Calculus'' by

Elias Loomis Elias Loomis (August 7, 1811 – August 15, 1889) was an American mathematician. He served as a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Western Reserve College (now Case Western Reserve University), the University of the City of New Yo ...

, Augustus De Morgan's ''Elements of Algebra'', and the last nine volumes of ''

Euclid's Elements The ''Elements'' ( grc, Στοιχεῖα ''Stoikheîa'') is a mathematical treatise consisting of 13 books attributed to the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt 300 BC. It is a collection of definitions, postulat ...

'' (from Henry Billingsley's edition), the first six volumes of which having been rendered into Chinese by Matteo Ricci and

Xu Guangqi Xu Guangqi or Hsü Kuang-ch'i (April 24, 1562– November 8, 1633), also known by his baptismal name Paul, was a Chinese agronomist, astronomer, mathematician, politician, and writer during the Ming dynasty. Xu was a colleague and collaborato ...

in 1607. A great number of mathematical terms used in Chinese today were first coined by Li, who were later borrowed into the

Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ...

as well. He discovered the Li Shanlan identity (Li Shanlan's summation formulae) in 1867. Later he worked in the think tank of

Zeng Guofan Zeng Guofan, Marquis Yiyong (; 26 November 1811 – 12 March 1872), birth name Zeng Zicheng, courtesy name Bohan, was a Chinese statesman and military general of the late Qing dynasty. He is best known for raising and organizing the Xiang ...

. In 1868, he began to teach in

Tongwen Guan The School of Combined Learning, or the Tongwen Guan () was a government school for teaching Western languages (and later scientific subjects), founded at Peking (Beijing), China in 1862 during the late-Qing dynasty, right after the conclusion o ...

where he collaborated closely with linguist John Fryer.

References

External links

Biography
at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive 1810 births 1882 deaths 19th-century Chinese mathematicians 19th-century Chinese translators Educators from Jiaxing Mathematicians from Zhejiang Qing dynasty translators People from Haining Scientists from Jiaxing Writers from Jiaxing {{China-translator-stub

See also

References

External links