Category: Mathematics Books

Introduction Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Japan was totally isolated from the West by imperial decree. During that time, a unique brand of homegrown mathematics flourished, one that was completely uninfluenced by developments in Western mathematics. People from all walks of life–samurai, farmers, and merchants–inscribed a wide variety of geometry problems on wooden tablets called sangaku and hung them in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines throughout Japan. Sacred Mathematics is the first book published in the West to fully examine this tantalizing–and incredibly beautiful–mathematical tradition. Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman present for the…