'Amateur' Proofs Blend Religion And Scholarship in Ancient Japan

摘要

A 300-year-old Japanese art form presents some surprising mathematical discoveries on elegant wooden tablets. When Japan was isolated from the rest of the world, a unique brand of mathematics flourished in the country's shrines and temples. Amateur mathematicians crafted geometric theorems on elegant wooden tablets called sangaku (literally "mathematical tablets") and offered them to the gods. Remarkably, some of those theorems predate by more than a century the work of Western mathematicians.