Ancient Chinese Origins of Modern Western Science; or, The Early History of Linear Algebra

Linear algebra is one of the mathematical foundations of modern science; it is also an essential mathematical framework of quantum sciences. Traditional accounts contend that linear algebra is exclusively Western in origin: linear algebra, we are to believe, suddenly simultaneously appears ex nihilo in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European treatises, without history or precedent. Research I have completed fills in this missing early history, demonstrating that linear algebra developed first in China and later spread throughout Eurasia, including Europe and Japan. More specifically, the essentials of the key methods used today in modern linear algebra are recorded in extant Chinese mathematical treatises dating from the first-century CE up through the seventeenth century and circulated across the Eurasian continent by the sixteenth century. The early history of linear algebra, then, demonstrates that the most significant mathematics of this period circulated from China to Europe, and not vice versa.