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Yang Hui
Southern Song mathematician from Hangzhou whose textbooks preserved Jia Xian's triangle of binomial coefficients and recorded many magic squares
In a calculation room, a wide table holds a board of black and yellow counting rods laid in neat bundles, beside an abacus, a ruler and a sheet with a circle divided into equal parts; one person sits at a far desk with their back turned, and terraced fields lie outside.
Also known as Zi Qianguang
- Roles
- Mathematician
Yang Hui, courtesy name Qianguang, was a native of Qiantang (Hangzhou) in the last decades of the Southern Song; no official biography exists, and his life is known only from the prefaces to his books. In 1261 he completed the twelve-chapter Detailed Analysis of the Nine Chapters, followed in 1262 by Arithmetic for Daily Use. Between 1274 and 1275 he wrote three further works on short-cut multiplication and division, field measurement and curious problems, later printed together as Yang Hui's Methods of Computation (Yang Hui suanfa). The Detailed Analysis quotes Jia Xian's triangular table of binomial coefficients, which is how it survived and why it is commonly called Yang Hui's triangle, and the Continuation of Ancient Curious Methods gives constructions for many magic squares. Concerned with teaching, he included in one of these books a study plan that set out what a beginner should learn and for how many days.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; wrote between 1261 and 1275