Thorsten Pattberg

“ Surprisingly, today traditional Chinese mathematics like mechanical proofs or ‘Wu Wenjun’s method’ experience a revival in Computational Sciences, just as Chinese medicine, Chinese education and Chinese politics do in the other respective fields; all these disciplines are now striving again for recognition in world science.
To sum up, only after the West, culturally and scientifically, “invaded” the Eastern hemisphere, did mathematics in China become the universally axiomatic-deductive driven vehicle it is today. But Western invasion was not the precursor for sciences in China. ”

“ A discovery of revolutionary proportions in the evolution of culture: an entire civilization, the East, goes down a more induction-based path, arriving at universals; while another civilization, the West, goes down the exact opposite, a more deduction-based path, arriving at particulars? If that is what happened, it would constitute a discovery of great consequences; it would mean that Western superior history has been ideologically and methodically biased, if not inherently flawed, throughout the ages: The academic discipline of history is inevitably ideological in essence. ”

“ I said “rather lucky than good”, because some scholars, by bending history to the point of breaking, want us to believe that “evil” Western dominance in Asia can only be explained by the lucky insensitive of scientific discoveries like rifles and cannons (Chirot, 1991) on top of innocent China’s gunpowder. ”

“ Regardless of what might be the case with individual historical events, historical narration is always the result of a series of selective choices, so that the influence of the historian’s standpoint is inescapable. ”

“ In 1630, China could feed its 70 million people. Some 120 years later, when Britain was forced to think scientifically about how to improve its agriculture in order to feed its “overpopulation” of some 5,7 million, China already nurtured a nation of roughly 200 million. ”

“ As a rule, in traditional Chinese mathematics, a geometric problem was almost universally converted into an algebraic problem, quite different from the geometrical approach lets say in Euclid’s Elements. ”

“ Don’t expect any great proportions of American or British citizens– even the more educated ones- ever to learn the host’s language or to know anything about the host other than the information they got from English textbooks. ”

“ However, what they reported back to Europe about the kind, good-hearted, intelligent and confident Chinaman and his unique state morality and Confucian/Daoism/Buddhism mode of conduct, often nurtured a certain dislike for the ‘second humanity’. ”