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The Nine Chapters On The Mathematical Art (九章算術) is a Chinese Mathematics book, probably composed in the 1st Century AD, but perhaps as early as 200 BC. Most scholars believe that Chinese mathematics and the mathematics of the ancient Mediterranean world had developed more or less independently up to the time when the Nine Chapters reached its final form. The Suan Shu Shu is an ancient Chinese text on mathematics approximately seven thousand characters in length, written on 190 bamboo strips. It was discovered together with other writings in 1983 when Archaeologist s opened a tomb at Zhangjiashan in Hubei province. From documentary evidence this tomb is known to have been closed in 186 BC, early in the Western Han Dynasty . While its relationship to the Nine Chapters is still under discussion by scholars, some of its contents are clearly paralleled there. The text of the Suan shu shu is however much less systematic than the Nine Chapters; and appears to consist of a number of more or less independent short sections of text drawn from a number of sources. In the third century Liu Hui wrote his commentary on the Nine Chapters and also wrote Haidao suanjing which dealt with using Pythagorean theorem, which in China was known as Gougu theorem, to measure the size of things. In the fifth century the manual called "Zhang Qiujian suanjing" discussed linear and quadratic equations. By this point the Chinese had the concept of Negative Numbers and arguably had the concept of Zero . By the Tang Dynasty study of math was fairly standard in the great schools. Things grew quiet for a time until the thirteenth century Renaissance of Chinese math. This saw Chinese mathematicians solving equations with methods Europe would not know until the Eighteenth Century . The high point of this era came with Zhu Shijie's two books ''Suanxue qimeng'' and the ''Siyuan yujian''. In one case he reportedly gave a method equivalent to Gauss 's pivotal condensation. He also worked with a form of Pascal Triangle in the thirteenth century, but called it "the ancient method of powers up to the eighth." However after the overthrow of the Yuan Dynasty China became suspicious of knowledge it used. The Ming Dynasty turned away from math and physics in favor of Botany and Pharmacology . A revival of math in China began in the late nineteenth century, but this would largely be based on Western modes or knowledge. FAMOUS CHINESE MATHEMATICIANS See .
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