xu yue

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English - English
born 185, Donglai, China died 227, China Chinese astronomer and mathematician. He wrote several books, of which only Shushu jiyi ("Memoir on the Methods of Numbering") is extant; some scholars question its authenticity. The treatise was used as an auxiliary mathematics textbook in the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) state universities. Its first part provides three methods of assigning the powers of 10 up to 10^4,096 to traditionally established terms for "large numbers" and alludes to a method of indefinite generation of even larger numbers. The second part contains descriptions of various devices for representing, if not actually manipulating, large numbers. Among them the book mentions a device resembling the abacus, which some scholars believe originated in China