I was admitted to the Department of Civil Engineering of Zhejiang University in 1934 and transferred to the Department of Mathematics in 1936. In 1938, he participated in the Anti-Japanese Salvation Movement in Changsha, and in 1939, he went to Yishan to resume his studies, and was one of the initiators of the "Pioneer Society" and the first core person in charge. After graduating from Zhejiang University in 1940, he taught at middle schools and universities in Guiyang, Chongqing, Jiaxing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Suzhou. After the founding of New China, in all the movements, there was no incident and no impact. During the Cultural Revolution, he was the leader of the newspaper reading group for ten years. Nor was he criticized, nor did he do anything to "fall into a well". A lifetime of leisure. He retired in 1987.
First, the situation in my hometown and my childhood
Two
I am from Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province. My great-grandfather's name was Qian Shengchao and he was a businessman. There are many fields, houses. My grandfather was his sixth son. When the family was separated, my grandfather was given a lot of land and real estate. My grandmother said. When she got married, the matchmaker said that my grandfather had three hundred acres, which were in the Area of Zhenru Township outside the South Gate of Jiaxing, and the property was in the head of the locust tree.
My grandfather's name was Qian Dixiang, and my grandmother's name was Chen Lanzheng, and I had four or five children (I only knew one uncle and one aunt after I was born.) My father was the eldest, and my grandfather never did anything in his life, but he believed in the "foreign affairs" at that time, sold some fields, provided his children to study in the "foreign school", smoked opium smoke, played with foreign things such as cameras. My grandmother said that my grandfather was a "loser." My grandfather died of illness in 1918 (at the age of 48), and the rent (about one hundred yuan a year) was applied to my grandmother, and after the beginning of the War of Resistance, my grandmother went to the interior with her family, and the rent was collected by the people of the clan, and they sold some of the land. My uncle and my aunt died of diabetes and lung disease in Suzhou in 1923-1924.
His father, Qian Baochun, was born in 1892. When he was a teenager, he studied in the public Xiushui County School and Suzhou Railway School in Jiaxing Province, and at the age of 16, he successfully passed the Zhejiang Provincial Government Fee International Student Examination and went to Birmingham and Manchester in the United Kingdom to study. In 1912, after graduating from the University of England, his father returned to China and taught at Nanyang Public School in Shanghai and Jiangsu Provincial Second Engineering College in Suzhou. He taught at Nankai University in Tianjin from 1925 to 1927, nanjing Central University from 1927 to 1928, and Zhejiang University from 1928 to 1956. Spring 1956. On the strong recommendation of Zhu Kezhen, he was transferred to the Research Office of the History of Chinese Natural Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing as a first-class researcher.
My father married in 1914. My mother's name was Zhu Huizhen, born into a family of painters, the Zhu family had no land, my grandmother was widowed, and she opened a small school in Shanghai. My mother graduated from the church's secondary school, was very good at English, and had been a primary school teacher for many years. After graduating from Nanyang College, his uncle Zhu Fuyi (Zi Zhipeng) went to WISCONSIN University in the United States for further study, and after returning to China, he worked as an engineer in Hanyeping (Hankou) for ten years, and then served as the chief engineer of the Shanghai Telephone Bureau until his death. At that time, my father was the director of the civil engineering department of Suzhou Gongzhuan, with a salary of nearly two hundred yuan (the price of rice at that time was only four or five yuan a quintal), in addition to providing for my aunt to study in Beijing, my uncle also gave my grandfather and grandmother some money for them to "enjoy happiness".
I was born in 1915 in Suzhou Tianci Xue Women's and Children's Hospital, from 1921 to 1925 in Suzhou Pingzhi Primary School, in 1925 because my father went to Tianjin to teach, I lived in Shanghai uncle's house, I studied primary school and junior high school in Shanghai Dananmen Yucai Middle School, until 1928, my family moved south to Jiaxing, transferred to Jiaxing Xiuzhou Middle School.
2. Secondary school and university period
From 1928 to 1934, I was in the second to third year of high school at Jiaxing Xiuzhou Middle School. Xiuzhou Middle School is a Christian school, when I entered the school, there was no religious class, and did not force students to "pray", the curriculum is the same as the provincial middle school, some religious activities, free to participate, I do not believe in religion, always play at home on Sundays. In 1931, after the Japanese warlords invaded the three eastern provinces of the mainland, I also participated in the propaganda team in the school to publicize activities such as resisting Japan and boycotting Japanese goods. When I was in high school, I read the weekly magazine "Life" published in Shanghai and edited by Zou Taofen, read some novels and articles by Mr. Lu Xun, and also read Hu Shi's "Independent Review" and Lin Yutang's "Analects". Because Xiuzhou is a church school, there are several Americans teaching English, receiving some propaganda, and having a certain admiration for foreign ideas. But I don't want to participate in religious activities, and I read some books on science when I have time. In the second and third grades of high school, I was elected as the chairman of the school meal committee, the president of the student self-government association, and the class president several times.
From 1934 to 1940, I studied at Zhejiang University. Summer of 1934. I graduated from high school. When I applied for Zhejiang University, my first choice was the Department of Civil Engineering, and the second choice was the Department of Mathematics, and as a result, I was admitted to the Department of Civil Engineering. At that time, the curriculum of the Civil Engineering Department was very heavy, and the first grade class was more than 40 hours a week, which made me have a lot of difficulty coping. After the start of the "12.9" movement in 1935. The Students of Hangzhou initiated a petition in Nanjing, the reactionary President Guo Renyuan suppressed the student movement, and the students of the three colleges of Zhejiang University united to form a unified student union and drove Guo Renyuan away. I used to work as a messenger and messenger, because the Hangzhou Post Office wanted to check, and I sent Zhejiang University promotional materials to other places by train. In the spring of 1936, the new principal was Zhu Kezhen, and there was an air of democracy in the school.
I felt that the curriculum of the Department of Civil Engineering was too heavy and difficult to read, so I transferred to the Mathematics Department as a first-year student in the spring of 1936. Because there are many public classes (foreign languages and the like) that I have already read in the Civil Engineering Department, I don't have to re-read them. Therefore, in addition to reviewing and strengthening the content of the first-year teaching courses, I also chose to read some courses in the Department of History and Geography, such as cultural history, nearly one hundred years of history, and so on.
In 1937, the "July 7" War of Resistance began, the "8.13" Shanghai also fought, Zhejiang University opened in September, and by November Hangzhou was in a hurry, and decided to move south to Jiande. Ten people in my family (grandmother, father, mother, me, six sisters) also moved to Jiande. Zhejiang University only lived in Jiande for more than a month and then moved to Ji'an, Jiangxi. Because the traffic situation was chaotic at that time, my family could not move the whole family, so they moved their grandmother, mother and six younger sisters to the jiande countryside for temporary living. In February 1938 I rushed back to Jiande from Jian'an. Trying to move my family to Changsha, I took a break from school to take care of the family, while my father was still teaching at Zhejiang University. From February to August 1938, while I was in Changsha, I joined the military service department of the National YMCA, which was led by Liu Liangmo. At that time, Liu Liangmo had always been with Shen Junru and Zou Taofen, and often wrote for Shen and Zou's "Life" to publicize the anti-Japanese ideology. Liu knew that I was a college student and told me that the brand of the service department was a youth association, doing rescue work. So I followed him, running a club for the wounded soldiers' hospital and teaching the masses to sing. I often heard speeches by "leftist" celebrities, and I worked with him as an interpreter to accompany Smedley to the hospital to comfort him. At that time, the situation of cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party had not been broken, the air of salvation in Changsha and Wuhan was better, the Eighteenth Group Army still had offices in Changsha, and Comrade Xu Teli had given several speeches in lectures held by the YMCA, and I had also listened to them.
In the summer of 1938, Changsha was bombed several times. Zhejiang University moved from Jiangxi to Yishan, Guangxi, and my family and I left Changsha in August. Moved to Yishan. I also went to Zhejiang University to resume my studies as a third-year student in the Department of Mathematics. Zhou Cunguo and Yao Fengxian, who left school in the autumn of 1937, also returned to school. Introduced by Zhou Cunguo and others, I joined the Black and White Literary and Art Society and became a core member, and because I had carried out salvation propaganda and mass singing in Changsha, I became the captain of the Dawn Singing Team. The Black and White Literary Society is divided into three groups. In the philosophy group of the Black and White Society, everyone reads "Popular Philosophy", "Philosophy of Science", "State and Revolution" publications and articles, and discusses them intensively every two weeks. There is a poster published by the Black Self-Art Society, nominated as a "satellite". There are also two groups, the Political Economy Group and the Literary and Art Group. Our public activity is to organize a literary and art forum to commemorate the second anniversary of Lu Xun's death. The Dawn Singing Team engaged in some people's night schools, charity sales and donations, teaching the masses to sing, etc., and the most members of the team were 70 or 80 people. The backbone members of the two organizations, Black and White and Dawn, often met together to study work, and we often held meetings at Zhou Cunguo's residence, when spies paid attention to these two organizations. After several months of working on campus, the average student has a good feeling for us. So just after the school started in the spring of 1939, when the Zhejiang University Student Union was re-elected, I was elected as the president of the Student Self-Government Association, and from then on some work could be done in the name of the Student Union. We went to Huaiyuan Town to run a private school, went to a hospital to comfort the wounded soldiers, thwarted the activities of the Three Youth League elements to premeditate the expulsion of President Zhu Kezhen, and organized the surrender of Wang Jingwei, thus cracking down on the reactionary Kuomintang legislator Zhang Qiyun (then director of the Department of History and Geography), and so on. In November and December 1939, when the Japanese invading army invaded Guangxi, the student union organized a field service group and held a charity sale.
3. Service period from 1940 to 1949
In July 1940, I graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Zhejiang University, and wanted to stay in Zunyi to do things, and I could take care of my family, but I did not want to be an assistant teacher in the Department of Mathematics of Zhejiang University, and after the introduction of Professor Fei Gong of Zhejiang University, I went to zunyi to teach at the private Yuzhang Middle School in Zunyi and became the director of teaching. Later, due to disagreement with the principal, he left the school in November. In December, he went to teach at Guiyang High School (the school was moved to Xiuwen County to avoid bombing at that time). Yangmingdong in Xiuwen County had Zhang Xueliang locked up in it at that time, so there were many spies in the area. When I first arrived, I didn't dare to move except to teach in class. At that time, guizhou's educational circles had a very heavy local concept, and it was necessary to crowd out teachers from other places. The principal of the school, Liu Xuanyu, is an old mathematics teacher, and I am close to him, playing cards with him on a daily basis. In 1943, with the encouragement and help of Liu Fuyu, I completed my first book, "The Latest Use of Trigonometry" (published by Enlightened Bookstore in 1946). Under mr. Liu's introduction, I also wrote a "Junior High School Arithmetic Tutorial" for Wenguang Bookstore. In February 1944 I went from Xiuwen to Baisha.
From February 1944 to July 1944, I was teaching in the advanced class of Baisha Town University in Jiangjin County, Sichuan Province, which was recommended by my father's old colleague Zhang Chun, the director of the teaching department of the advanced class. Most of the teachers in the preparatory class are "famous teachers" of Jiangsu Provincial Middle School, and colleagues are very unhappy. In the summer of 1944, the first class changed class teachers, and I went to Chongqing to play. Living in the private Guangyi Middle School on the south bank (at that time, the old classmate was stationed in Guangyi to teach chemistry), but was retained by Guangyi's principal Yang Fangling, and I taught in Guangyi. Guangyi was an "aristocratic" school that received the children of powerful, powerful, and famous people. Yang Fangling also relied on this group of "parents" to publicize and expand her school. Because my teaching at the school was still popular, President Yang asked me to do homework for several other students. Among these students were Du Weining, son of Du Yuesheng, Zhu Peigen, son of Zhu Xuefan, and Gu Longsheng, son of Gu Jiatang.
In February 1944, I met several old classmates who graduated from Jiaxing Xiuzhou Middle School in Chongqing, and at that time, everyone felt that they were far away from home, working outside, most afraid of unemployment, illness, some people still wanted to get married, and so on. Therefore, we organized a "Xiuzhou Jiashu Grade (1934) Grade Friendship Mutual Aid Association", and everyone took out about 5% of their salary every month and handed it to Shen Yongsui, who worked at Jincheng Bank, and he transferred it to use. At that time, those who were willing to participate were Shen Yongsui, Zhu Youxi, Zhu Bingxiang, Zhu Monk, Jin Xingzhong, Hou Xizhong, and Jiang Lihong. And me, eight people. This mutual aid fund is working, Jin Xingzhong's illness expenses, as if Zhu Monk's marriage expenses are all used this one. After 1945, it was not much use, and everyone no longer paid it. After 1946. When Xiuzhou Middle School resumed, we donated the remaining funds to Xiuzhou Middle School.
In August 1945, after the victory of the War of Resistance, I was still teaching in Guangyi. Later, due to the lack of mathematics teachers in Baisha's advanced college course, I was afraid of continuing to teach in Guangyi and could not return to my hometown, so I returned to the Baisha preparatory class in October 1945, until the dissolution of the preliminary course in July 1946, I got the "demobilization fee", and in the summer of 1946, I took a road car from Chongqing to Baoji, through the Longhai Line to Nanjing, and returned to Jiaxing's original hometown.
In August 1946, when I returned to Jiaxing, just as my alma mater, Xiuzhou Middle School, was preparing to resume, I was left to teach in Xiuzhou. My family lived in Zunyi and Meitan, Guizhou for six or seven years, and moved back to Hangzhou with Zhejiang University in November 1946. Although I teach in Jiaxing, I basically go to my home in Hangzhou every week to rest.
In 1947. My girlfriend Zou Dezhen (a teacher at Shanghai Minli Girls' High School) wanted to marry me and encouraged me to teach in Shanghai. I resigned from the teaching position in Xiuzhou. Went to Shanghai Zhengshi Middle School to work and prepare for marriage. In July 1948, I had a wedding with Zou Dezhen at the Golden Gate Hotel in Shanghai, we lived in the Zhengshi School, and then there was a quarrel with the school because of the housing, so we left The Beginning and went to teach at the Minli Girls' High School until the summer vacation.
In May 1949, when Shanghai was liberated, the situation in the educational circles was more complicated, and Comrade Bei Wen of the East China Bureau of the Communist Party of China (she was a classmate of my sister Qian Wei) wanted to introduce me to Dalian to teach, but I did not want to go far because Zou Dezhen was pregnant. Just at this time, Hu Yutang, an old classmate of Zhejiang University, was appointed as the principal of Shaoxing Shangyu Baima Lake Chunhui Middle School, and asked me to go. In September 1949, I went to Shangyu Chunhui Middle School, and Zou Dezhen stayed in her hometown in Hangzhou to give birth.
After the founding of New China
August 1949. At the invitation of my old classmate Hu Yutang, I went to Teach at Shangyu Chunhui Middle School in Zhejiang Province, because the director of academic affairs that Hu Yutang had originally invited did not come, and I was the director of academic affairs since October. Chunhui was a private school, but in the spring of 1950, the number of students decreased, and the school board refused to allocate more funds, making it extremely difficult to maintain the school, although it also engaged in some labor and production work, it was useless. In the summer of 1950, the school was deflated. The faculty and staff have another way out, and the school cannot force them to stay. At that time, my sister Qian Xu was teaching at Nanjing No. 1 Middle School. The letter said that there was a shortage of mathematics teachers in the first middle school, so I went to Nanjing.
In August 1950, after I arrived at Nanjing No. 1 Middle School, the principal Zhu Gang attached great importance to me, and I added an education union. In the autumn of 1950, when I participated in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, I accused myself of the crimes of American teachers when I was in the middle school of the church, and played a role in the participation of some students. In order to make me feel at ease working in Nanjing. Principal Zhu Gang proposed that Zou Dezhen also be transferred to Nanjing No. 1 Middle School as a teacher. So we settled in Nanjing. In the spring of 1951, I was promoted to the head of the teaching and research team, and later as the deputy director of teaching, specializing in the teaching of mathematics, science, chemistry and other subjects. In the spring of 1951, Nanjing wanted to establish the Nanjing Branch of the Chinese Mathematical Society, because yizhong was a famous school in Nanjing and I was the leader of the mathematics teaching and research team, so I was elected as a preparatory committee member and later became the executive director of the Nanjing branch. From February to August 1952, I was transferred to Nanjing Normal College, and in September 1952, the division college was merged into Nanjing Normal University. At that time, Nanjing Normal College was composed of personnel from the former Jinling University, Jinling Women's University, Nanda University, Teachers College and other schools, and some of the people who originally taught at the university were not very valued by those of us who were originally middle school teachers, and we were not very accustomed to the practice of determining everything according to the "title" of the school house allocation. There are many mathematics teachers, students only have one class of subjects and classes (in 1953 there were subjects and departments), I did not have any proper homework to teach, so I chose two subjects that everyone is "layman", one is the teaching method of mathematics, the other is "theory and practice of calculation", everyone feels novel, so some people come to ask me, so I often go out to "make reports", especially the "approximate calculation" part, I have talked many times. Later, in 1954, the Jiangsu People's Publishing House asked me to write a booklet called "Approximate Calculation" (which was reprinted many times) and asked me to write a book on pedagogy. At that time, I was still teaching at the Workers' and Peasants' Accelerated High School attached to the South Division for a year. Since the fall of 1953 I have been teaching the Department's Analytical Geometry, a subject of mathematics pedagogy.
In 1955, the second department was adjusted, and the Department of Mathematics of the Southern Normal School was merged into Jiangsu Normal University (now Soochow University) in Suzhou, and our family moved to Suzhou. This adjustment, I feel satisfied, plus Suzhou is the place where I lived as a child, and I feel more cordial. At that time, I still taught analytic geometry, mathematics pedagogy, and also did some class teacher work and educational internship work. In August 1956, I joined the China Association for the Promotion of Democracy and later became a branch member of the Jiangsu Normal Academy of the China Association for Promoting Democracy. Also in 1956. Someone from the Jiangsu People's Publishing House came to me and asked if I could write something. I said no, but it was okay to see a Soviet workbook and asked if he could translate it. Later, the agency wrote to me asking me to translate, and prepaid part of my manuscript fee, and it took me less than a year to send the translation to the Jiangsu People's Publishing House, and in the spring of 1958, the book "Compilation of Mathematics Test Questions for College Entrance Examinations" was published. Because our textbooks were based on the Soviet Union at that time, the book was a best seller and once became an important reference book for college entrance examination students. In 1958, in Suzhou, I led two teaching assistants to write teaching methods for mainland China's own middle school mathematics textbooks.
Since 1962, I have often taken sick leave at home or hospitalized for gallbladder stones, and in 1965, when I was taking students to Tiger Hill Social Practice, I had an acute appendicitis attack, went to the hospital for surgery, and at the same time removed my gallbladder. The chief surgeon is huang Bingran, an old classmate of Jiaxing Xiuzhou Middle School, and the operation was successful and the hidden dangers were removed. After the operation, he suffered from intestinal adhesions. He did not go to work until April 1966, when he went to work and then participated in the Cultural Revolution. In the middle of the "Cultural Revolution" from 1972 to 1974, I went to Nanjing to participate in the compilation and review of teaching textbooks in middle schools in Jiangsu Province, and in the later period of the "Cultural Revolution", from 1974 to 1978, I participated in primary mathematics education in schools and the investigation and research work of mathematics teaching in middle schools. I am a member of the Chinese Mathematical Society, a member of the Mathematical History Branch of the Chinese Mathematical Society, and the vice chairman of the Suzhou Mathematical Society.
V. Research on the History of Mathematics
I have been a middle school teacher for more than ten years, and after being transferred to the teacher's college, I still delve into middle school mathematics problems, and I deeply feel the importance of mathematical history knowledge to mathematics teaching. My father, Qian Baochun, has been studying the history of Mathematics in China since 1920. He is a well-known expert in the history of mathematics at home and abroad. I began to delve into a number of mathematical history books in 1960, first reading CAJORI's monograph on the history of mathematics, A HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS, and translating more than 200 pages of the book (in existing manuscripts). Since 1962, he has given several special lectures to students every year to introduce the history of mathematics at home and abroad. After the "Cultural Revolution", from 1979 onwards, we began to compile lecture notes on the history of mathematics, focusing on two points: (1) to serve the teaching of mathematics; (2) the content should be correct, as far as possible to "connect The Chinese and the outside" and "use the ancient for the present".
After the lecture notes were compiled in 1981, I was invited to attend the inaugural meeting of the Mathematical History Branch of the Chinese Mathematical Society (in Dalian), at which I expounded my views and practices on the history of mathematics. It was appreciated by the experts present. In August 1982, I was invited by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to Beijing to participate in the Sino-Japanese Academic Exchange On the History of Mathematics and to discuss research results with my Japanese counterparts. In October 1982, at the Jiangsu Provincial Mathematics Annual Conference (Wuxi), I also publicized my ideas, which were well received by many peers. From 1981 until 1985, I opened an elective course on the history of mathematics at Soochow University, which was well received in jiangsu province and abroad, and I was invited to speak at universities, normal colleges and middle schools in Nanjing, Wuxi, Yangzhou and Suzhou. Jiaxing Xiuzhou Middle School also invited me to the school to give a mathematical history report to their senior students. During this period, I published more than ten monographs in journals such as Mathematics in Secondary School, Shanghai Education, Middle School Students, and Mathematics Education in Secondary Schools. In 1984, my thesis "Qin Jiushao's Problem of Finding Fixed Numbers in the Technique of Seeking One Technique" was selected by the experts of the Organizing Committee of the International Conference on the History of Science in China, and in August I went to Beijing to attend the Third International Symposium on the History of Chinese Science, where I read the paper, and during the conference, dr. Needham, a special guest of the organizing committee, the world-famous expert in the history of Chinese science and technology. Joseph Needham, an old friend of his father Qian Baochun in his 30s and 1940s, Joseph Needham wrote in the third volume of his monograph "History of Science and Technology in China": "Among the historians of mathematics in China, Li Yu and Qian Baochun are particularly prominent. Although Qian Baochun's works are fewer than Li Yu's, they are of the same quality") and Dr. Lu Guizhen had a cordial conversation and talked about friendship. After many repeated revisions, my last book, Selected Lectures on the History of Mathematics, was finally published by Jiangsu Education Publishing House in 1989, and mr. Yan Dunjie, a famous historian of mathematics, wrote the preface. In November 1989, the book was selected as the second prize of the first National Science and Technology History Outstanding Book by the Chinese Society for the History of Science and Technology.