Virtually nothing is known of the life of this Yuan 元 mathematician, except the little we can learn from the prefaces to his two books, Suanxue qimeng 算學啟蒙 (Introduction to Mathematical Studies, 1299) and Siyuan yujian 四元玉鑒 (The Jade Mirror of the Four Unknowns, 1303). The first preface was written by Zhao Cheng and the second one by Mo Ruo 莫若 and Zu Yi 祖乙. From those we can surmise that Zhu came from Yanshan 燕山, near modern Beijing; that he traveled around China for more than 20 years in the last decades of the thirteenth century, after China had been unified under the Mongol rule; and that numerous students came to study with him.
His books attest to the fact that he inherited – from the northern milieu of the Hebei 河北 and Shanxi 山西 provinces which developed the “procedure of the celestial unknown (lit.: origin)” (Tian yuan shu天元術) – how to use polynomial algebra to build an equation with which to solve a problem. This achievement seems to have been unknown in South China and...
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Chemla, K. (2014). Zhu Shijie 朱世傑. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_8959-2
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