Commentaries upon commentaries: The translation of the Jiu zhang suan shu 九章算術 by Karine Chemla and Guo Shuchun

摘要

The Chinese mathematical treatise Jiu zhang suan shu 九章算術(Computational Procedures of Nine Categories), compiled no later than the first century AD, was first translated into Russian [Berezkina, 1957] and later into German [Vogel, 1968] and Japanese [Oˉ ya, 1975; Shimizu, 1975–1976].1 However, the first complete translation into a modern language (Japanese) of the voluminous commentary credited to Liu Hui劉徽was not published until 1980 [Kawahara, 1980b], and it was not translated into any Western language until 1999 [Shen et al., 1999]. This essay review focuses on the full, annotated French translation of the treatise and commentary by Karine Chemla and Guo Shuchun [Chemla and Guo, 2004], yet a considerable part of it is devoted to the works of their precursors.