Japanese mathematics (和算, wasan?) denotes a distinct kind of mathematics which was developed in Japan during the Edo Period (1603–1867). The term wasan, from wa ("Japan") and san ("calculation"), was coined in the 1870s and employed to distinguish native Japanese mathematics theory from Western mathematics (洋算 yōsan).
In the history of mathematics, the development of wasan falls outside the Western realms of people, propositions and alternate solutions. At the beginning of the Meiji era (1868–1912), Japan and its people opened themselves to the West. Japanese scholars adopted Western mathematics, and this led to a decline of interest in the ideas used in wasan.
Read more about Japanese Mathematics: History, Select Mathematicians
Famous quotes containing the words japanese and/or mathematics:
“A pragmatic race, the Japanese appear to have decided long ago that the only reason for drinking alcohol is to become intoxicated and therefore drink only when they wish to be drunk.
So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)