Li Yan (mathematician)

Li Yan (born August 22, 1892 in Fuzhou , † January 14, 1963 in Beijing ) was a Chinese mathematician.

Li Yan came from an educated but poor family. From 1912 he studied at the Railway and Mining School in Tangshan , but then had to drop out after a year and worked for 42 years as an engineer at the Long Hai Railway. As early as 1915, however, his preoccupation with the history of Chinese mathematics began, about which he corresponded at the time with the American mathematician David Eugene Smith . 1957 to 1963 he was the first director of the Institute for the History of Science of the Academia Sinica in Beijing. The important mathematicians Qian Baocong and Yan Dunjie (1917–1988) also worked there from the mid-1950s .

Along with Qian Baocong, Li Yan is considered to be a pioneer of the historiography of Chinese mathematics in the 20th century. In particular, he was known for his editions of Chinese classical math texts. He published 20 books and around 100 papers.

He published his essays in four anthologies (Zhonshuansi luncong) in 1933, 1935 and 1947 (a new five-volume edition appeared in the 1950s).

His History of Chinese Mathematics was published in 1937 (translated into Japanese in 1940) and further summaries he published in 1958 (An overview of the history of Chinese mathematics, two volumes) and another in 1963 with Du Shiran, which was also translated into English.

He donated his extensive collection of Chinese mathematical texts to the Institute for the History of Science of the Academia Sinica in Beijing.

Fonts

• with Du Shiran: Chinese mathematics: a concise history , Clarendon Press, Oxford 1987

literature

• Dauben, Scriba (editor): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser, 2002