Dead man working

摘要

"A fox, a wildcat and a dog go through a customs-post. They are taxed 111 cash. The dog says to the wildcat, and the wildcat says to the fox, 'Your skin is worth twice mine; you should pay twice as much tax!'" Who pays what? In 186 BC, a civil servant employed by the Emperor of China was buried in a tomb in what is now Hubei Province, along with a few books he might want to read in the afterlife. Among them was China's earliest known work on mathematics, a collection of problems, including the one about the fox, complete with answers and methods of calculation. Against expectations, not all the maths was practical, its purpose to keep the empire running smoothly. It seems even then some people did maths just for fun.