The Great Wall was completed under the Qin Dynasty. To help ensure the administrative efficiency and cultural unity needed in the empire, the government imposed a standard system of characters for writing as well as a standard system of units for measurement.
The units of area were as follows:. Randy K. Skip to main content. Search form Search. Login Join Give Shops. Halmos - Lester R. Ford Awards Merten M. Author s :. System of Units The decimal number system also influenced Chinese units of measurement. They used both forms of the numbers given in the above illustration. In the units column they used the form in the lower row, while in the tens column they used the form in the upper row, continuing alternately.
For example is represented on the counting board by: and by: There was still no need for a zero on the counting board for a square was simply left blank. The alternating forms of the numbers again helped to show that there was indeed a space.
For example would be represented as: Ancient arithmetic texts described how to perform arithmetic operations on the counting board. Similarly to divide by 10 , , , or the rods are moved to the right by 1 , 2 , 3 , or 4 squares. What is significant here is that Xiahou Yang seems to understand not only positive powers of 10 but also decimal fractions as negative powers of This illustrates the significance of using counting board numerals. Now the Chinese counting board numbers were not just used on a counting board, although this is clearly their origin.
They were used in written texts, particularly mathematical texts, and the power of the place valued notation led to the Chinese making significant advances.
In particular the "tian yuan" or "coefficient array method" or "method of the celestial unknown" developed out of the counting board representation of numbers. This was a notation for an equation and Li Zhi gives the earliest source of the method, although it must have been invented before his time.
In about the fourteenth century AD the abacus came into use in China. Certainly this, like the counting board, seems to have been a Chinese invention. In many ways it was similar to the counting board, except instead of using rods to represent numbers, they were represented by beads sliding on a wire.
Arithmetical rules for the abacus were analogous to those of the counting board even square roots and cube roots of numbers could be calculated but it appears that the abacus was used almost exclusively by merchants who only used the operations of addition and subtraction. Here is an illustration of an abacus showing the number For numbers up to 4 slide the required number of beads in the lower part up to the middle bar.
For example on the right most wire two is represented. For five or above, slide one bead above the middle bar down representing 5 , and 1 , 2 , 3 or 4 beads up to the middle bar for the numbers 6 , 7 , 8 , or 9 respectively. For example on the wire three from the right hand side the number 8 is represented 5 for the bead above, three beads below. One might reasonably ask why each wire contains enough beads to represent In my opinion, the Normal Chinese characters may not be used by non-Mandarin speaking Chinese since this requires the knowledge of the Chinese language.
However, these Chinese characters or Chinese character-based numerals are shared with countries influenced by the Chinese culture in the past, e. Japan, Korea, Vietnam. So non-Chinese speakers in certain countries use the Chinese character-based numerical system, too. But they pronounce them differently. Category : MitoPedia.
0コメント