Ruan Yuan

Ruǎn Yuán (born February 21, 1764 in Yangzhou ; † November 27, 1849 ibid) was a Chinese mathematician, mathematician and high state official (governor of several provinces).

Life

Ruan Yuan came from a respected family (one grandfather was a general) and was accepted into the Imperial Hanlin Academy in 1790 after passing the civil service examination . He was a supporter of a new direction of higher studies in China, which resorted to the original works instead of the standardized commentaries of the classics, which is why the Chinese emperor in 1772 commissioned the search for the oldest possible editions in order to make critical editions possible.

Ruan Yuan held various high positions and was in the Ministry of Education of the Shandong Provinces and from 1795 in the Zhejiang Province in Hangzhou . There he began to put together his collection of biographies of important mathematicians and astronomers (Chouren zhuan), for which he is best known and which is a collaborative effort with colleagues such as Li Rui (1765-1814). But he also took on other scholars and engineers (even musicians and poets) and not only 275 Chinese, but also 41 Western scholars. The work also contained detailed quotations from the works of authors such as Ptolemy and Copernicus , some of which were thus made known to Chinese readers for the first time. The actual biographical information mainly relates to official positions in the sense of the Confucian tradition of biographies. One of the main goals of Ruan Yuan was to prove the Chinese origin of many of the achievements of Western astronomy brought to light by the Jesuits in China. Ruan Yuan and colleagues made serious mistakes with the Western scholars (Copernicus is listed twice under different names), many are listed primarily because of their connection to China (like Jesuit scholars ) and some of those listed are astonishing from today's point of view (like a British captain named Auguste Lendy). For the book he collected and looked for old books, which he continued in his further career. The book appeared in 1799. Several new editions with additions (for example 44 new biographies by his student Luo Shilin for the 1840 edition) appeared (1829, 1840, 1842, 1888) and it was reprinted in 1935 and 1955. A supplement edition by Zhu Kebao appeared in 1886 with 129 new biographies and one by Huang Zhongjun in 1898.

In 1799 he became professor of mathematics at the Imperial Academy (guozijan). In 1800 he also became governor of Zheijang Province. He also wrote a dictionary for the study of the classics and founded a school of classical literature (Gujing jingshe). In 1806 he became Chancellor of Henan Province. In 1809 his career took a turn for the worse because of an incident in the state exams for officials for which he was responsible. He was demoted and returned to the Hanlin Academy as a scholar. In 1810 he became director of the historical library. In 1814 he became Governor of Jiangxi Province and in 1817 Governor General of Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces in southern China. There he also founded his own Xuehaitang Academy in Guangdong. In 1826 he became governor of Yunnan and Guizhou Provinces and in 1835 he became Grand Secretary. In 1838 he retired.

In addition to books, he also collected ritual bronze cauldrons, about whose inscriptions he wrote a book in 1804.

See also

• Shisanjing zhushu

literature

• Jean-Claude Martzloff: A history of chinese mathematics , Springer, p. 166 ff
• Betty Peh-T'i Wei: Ruan Yuan, 1764-1849. The life and work of a major scholar-official in nineteenth-century China before the Opium War , Hong Kong University Press, Aberdeen Hongkong 2006, ISBN 978-962-209-785-8

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Ruan Yuan. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .