Math in Ancient China
People in China were using written numbers by about 1500 BC, in the Shang Dynasty. This is about two thousand years later than people began to write numbers in West Asia, and more than a thousand years later than people began to write numbers in India. Nobody knows whether people in China thought of the idea to write numbers for themselves or learned it from people in West Asia or India. Chinese people counted in base ten, like people in India. But the Chinese system was more efficient. In China, people wrote the number 465 like this: 4 times the symbol for hundreds plus 6 times the symbol for ten plus 5. This way of writing numbers made it easier to do addition and multiplication than the West Asian system, which used base 60. It is possible that this way of calculating with place markers influenced later Indian mathematicians who worked out the use of zero.
By 450 BC, Zu Chongzhi was able to figure out what pi was to seven decimal places.
Sometime before 190 AD, people in Han Dynasty China began to use the abacus. People in the Persian Empire were probably using the abacus by 500 BC, and in Greece by 300 BC, but we can't be sure whether the abacus was invented in China or in West Asia.
The earliest Chinese mathematical textbook is called the Nine Chapters. Parts of it seem to have been written near the beginning of the Han Dynasty, about 200 BC.
Craft project: make your own Chinese abacus
To find out more about Chinese mathematics, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Science in Ancient China, by George Beshore (1998). For kids.
The Ambitious Horse: Ancient Chinese Mathematics Problems, by Lawrence Swienciki (2001).
Ancient China: 2,000 Years of Mystery and Adventure to Unlock and Discover (Treasure Chest), by Chao-Hui Jenny Liu (1996). Lots of activities for kids, including a Chinese calligraphy set.
A History of Chinese Mathematics, by Jean-Claude Martzloff (1997). For adults. Explains the differences between Chinese and Euclidean (Greek) mathematics.
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife and Matt Zimet (2000).
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The Nine Chapters (a Chinese math textbook)
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