Genius of the East

As the halt of mathematical progress came in the west, it was east that continued this progress and gave birth to the modern world. In the part 2 of the movie The Story of Maths, the story revealed how the Chinese Empire, Indians, and Islamic Empire used mathematics in their daily lives. It also revealed how advanced the ancient east was compared to the ancient west in some aspects of mathematics – contrary to the popular belief that mathematics was only develop in the ancient west.

    

Mathematics for the Chinese Empire can be seen in their daily lives. Since Chinese were superstitious people, they used math to support their cosmological and astronomical beliefs. In fact, their astronomers were basically mathematicians. Math which was also used in the development of their calendars also had the power to impose on the emperor’s decisions. Even how the emperor sleeps with different women showed a geometric progression which I found really funny. The ancient Chinese also showed their fascination for patterns through their Magic Square. A square that horizontally, vertically, and diagonally adds up to 15. Another amazing thing about Chinese Empire’s math can be seen in China’s defense – the famous Great Wall of China. This wall took 2000 years to be built. Standing up to this day, this wall is an amazing feat of engineering – thousands, or even millions of calculations may had been done for this wall. For the ancient Chinese’s calculations, they used bamboo rods to represent the digits 1-9. They were able to use the concept of decimal place value system which makes calculations easier. But their flaw was that they did not have a concept and symbol for zero, and had just used blank to represent nothing.