Q. What made you translate the text and the notes to the Nine Chapters of Mathematical Procedures into French?
A. I laboured in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, but I didn't give up on mathematics and history. When the movement ended in the late 1970s, I went straight into the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The academy assigned me to study the Nine Chapters of Mathematical Procedures. The book dates back to 213BC and for more than 2,000 years, it was China's most important mathematics text. Previous studies by scholars were so comprehensive that most people believed there was no new ground to break. But I delved into it anyway.
In the early 1980s, I discovered the Procedures' most valuable treasure was in its notes, not in the main text; and the note-maker Liu Hui, born in 263AD, is probably the greatest mathematician in Chinese history. But the rest of the world and even the most renowned Chinese scholars, barely knew anything about him or his contributions. So in 1985, with the help of a French student, I started translating it.
Why is the work important?
The Procedures' main text has only about 10,000 characters. It tells you how to solve a problem but never explains why. In his notes, Liu Hui provided excellent proof, corrected mistakes and developed some revolutionary mathematical concepts that were about 1,000 years ahead of the rest of the world.
But his notes are very difficult to understand, so many Chinese scholars skipped them in their research. The book has been translated into German, Japanese and Russian, yet none of those versions includes them. And its title has been translated as Nine Chapters of Mathematical Art; So most people held that Chinese mathematics was about application or craftsmanship directly drawn from experience. Chinese logic was considered inferior to that of the ancient Greeks, whose intellectual tradition is regarded by many as the origin of western science.