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Article Dans Une Revue East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine Année : 2021

Regional Networks in Chinese Mathematics and Astronomy, 311-618 CE

Résumé

This article offers a social and geographical network analysis of all attested works, authors, and practitioners in the mathematical sciences in China over the period of disunion and reunification from 311 to 618 CE. Inspired by Karine Chemla’s (2009) efforts to distinguish “different mathematical cultures” within the extant corpus of suan 筭/算 procedure texts, the goal is to explore a viable framework within which to break down the history of Chinese mathematics along different, pluralistic lines. What I find is that this period is home to distinct regional networks working in isolation from one another, and that situating authors within these networks helps explain continuities and discontinuities in their technical writing. This is evidence of plurality, but one that is incommensurable with Chemla’s “mathematical cultures,” so I offer it as an alternative means to the same historiographical ends. In examining what our historical subjects said and did about this plurality of traditions, however, we realize that it was as aberrant to them as the political disunion of which it was a product—something to rectified by “unification” (tongyi 統一), “integration” (tong 通), and, where necessary, force.
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Dates et versions

halshs-03363696 , version 1 (23-11-2021)

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Daniel Patrick Morgan. Regional Networks in Chinese Mathematics and Astronomy, 311-618 CE. East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2021, 53 (1-2), pp.3-55. ⟨10.1163/26669323-53010001⟩. ⟨halshs-03363696⟩
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