Recently, the Tokyo Olympic Games are in full swing, and there are two messages that are deeply imprinted in the mind of the poet Jun:
One is that a Chinese girl won the first gold for Canada a few days ago, and the other is a 14-year-old Chinese teenager who won the 10-meter platform diving championship the day before yesterday.
While marveling at them, The poet Jun couldn't help but think of a few poems:
In the picture, the people can be the same, and the husband's ambition is talented.
Who says that children are not heroes?
The girl who can win the Olympics is of course one of the best, but the author of this poem is probably one in a billion, because her achievements are unique:
In 2016, in the American bestseller "Fearless: 50 Women Scientists Who Influenced World History", she was included in it along with Marie Curie and Academician Wu Jianxiong;
In 2018, "The Power of Mathematics: The Rebellious Woman of Mathematics" written by an American mathematics professor specifically introduced her outstanding contributions in the field of mathematics;
The world's authoritative academic journal "Natural" listed her as "one of the female scientists who laid the foundation for scientific development".
She was even printed on postcards abroad: a scroll in one hand and a telescope in the other.
As far as the eye can see, it is the sea of stars and the vast universe.
However, she only lived for 29 years in China, was scolded for marrying late, indulging in science, and had no children, and her great achievements were often forgotten by the Chinese people.
She is Wang Zhenyi. A name that many people are unfamiliar with.
In ancient times, she was regarded as an outlandish outlier, but in modern times, people look back on her life and give birth to a mysterious sense of "opening and hanging".
01
In the thirty-third year of the Qianlong Dynasty (1768), Wang Zhenyi was born in Jiangning Province, Jiangsu Province (present-day Nanjing) to a family of scholars.
Her grandfather Wang Zhifu (王者助官) went to the prefect, and her father Wang Xichen (王西琛), who was repeatedly frustrated by the imperial examination, specialized in medicine and was also a famous doctor.
In the period of ancient Chinese feudal society, You Chengtingxun would most likely become a lady like Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochao; if it were not for a series of encounters later, she would not have become a learned female scientist.
If you want to ask the person who enlightened her the most on the road to becoming a scientist, it must be her grandfather.
This strange old man, who is in the official field, does not know how to sneak and shoot horses, does not care about being degraded and exiled, likes to study astrology, and his granddaughter also follows the "pit".
At the age of 11, after her grandfather was demoted to Jilin, she unfortunately died of illness, and Wang Zhenyi went with her mother to mourn and received a full 75 cabinets of books left by her grandfather.
It was at this time that she came into contact with the works of Zu Chongzhi, Zhang Heng, Monk Yixing, Guo Shoujing and other science giants, which laid the foundation for her future life of "opening and hanging".
In fact, her favorite is the mathematician Mei Wending in the early Qing Dynasty. Mei's "Pen Calculation" and "Calculation", she does not know how many times she has read it.
She "slurred (pronounced Kū) is involved in it day and night", and once wrote that "life is poor in learning, and it is a treasure to know the inches." What is difficult is in practice, what is still being heard" self-proverb poem inspires itself.
Through reading, she has a new and different understanding of her world and life:
Baigou River sense endowment
The white ditch river is endless, and the sun is thin and the sand is yellow and misty.
Shi Jie has many new tombs, and the battlefield is empty of ancient heroes.
The Broken Ge people dig into farming tools, and the bones will be strong in the autumn.
The road ahead chats from Hu late crossing, and the tragic song is infinitely felt feihong.
In addition to reading, Wang Zhenyi did not forget to exercise.
The Mongols looked down on the Central Plains and ridiculed her for being weak and could not help the wind, so she painstakingly followed a Mongolian lady to practice riding and shooting.
Day after day, the bow is opened, aimed, archery is fired, mounted and mounted to shoot.
Although Wang Zhenyi was small in stature, his talent was high, and in just a few years he had been able to "cross horses and cross swords, fly back and forth like a fly, and have a hundred shots."
In the face of the ridicule of the past, she wrote a poem to recall, "I also learned to shoot and review riding, and covered the powder to chase after the qi." ”
The teenager is dressed in fresh clothes and angry horses, she does not hide her arrogance and sharpness, real and confident.
At the age of 16, she returned to Nanjing, and although she learned to be a female red under the supervision of her mother, she still could not resist her temperament, and soon followed her father to study and practice medicine.
Ancient women were "not out of the door and not out of the door", she went through most of China:
She has not only seen the Yellow River and the Yangtze River rushing under the scorching sun, but also in the quiet cave court at night;
She had not only seen the heroes racing in Qinhuai, but also read the poems left by the sages in yueyang Lou.
Only by personally measuring the land with one's own footsteps can the mountains and seas be loaded into the heart:
Tongguan
Passing through Qinzhoukou, Guan Xiong controls Kyushu.
The heavy door is strictly keyed, and the collar is according to the throat.
Under the thousand rocks of the day, the Yellow River flows.
The southeast marks the dangerous boundary, and it is difficult to travel.
Dentai Daisy
The giant town of Biaoqilu, Chongwei overlooks Dadong.
Gu Yun steamed Wanxiu, Hai Ri bath sannomiya.
Reiki is dry and dimensional, and the divine root is connected to the earth axis.
The world of Gaoping is small, and the life is empty.
She not only has lin daiyu's talent, but also Du Fu's worries about the country and the people:
The mid-value drought in Fuchun Road is the same
The fields are green and yellow, and the red land and sky are plagued by drought.
The cottages have smoked out of the house several times, and the rich family has heard that Su Chen Cang.
The fugitives filled in the ravines, and the wild wept and reached the top.
Artemisia was pitiful, and the officials were still in a hurry to collect grain.
She also became aware of sexism early on, believing that women were inferior to men because they were not equally educated.
"Often on academics, never pay attention to women."
"Do you know that they are all human beings, and they are the same in learning?"
In that era when a woman's talentlessness is virtue, she is already a heroine among women:
Proficient in poetry and song, good at medicine.
Get off the horse and fight.
Even if she didn't take a half step forward, she was enough to make many people look up.
However, her life of hanging up was only officially started.
02
At the age of 18, Wang Zhenyi settled in Nanjing with her family.
The family's marriage urged her ears to grow cocoons, and the life of a single dog was not good.
She never lacked suitors, and she could have found a good husband in the traditional name of "talented woman", taught her husband and son in the boudoir, and then drowned in the long river of history.
However, she is partial to "beautiful people and wild roads" and must concentrate on academics.
Her early travel experience has long made her have thousands of ambitions in her heart: "Enough to travel thousands of books, try to be ambitious to win over her husband!" ”
At the age of 18 to 24, she completed most of her academic breakthroughs.
Someone else is dating, and she is studying mathematics:
She used simple texts and equations to interpret the multiplication and division and Pythagorean theorem, and authored a volume of "Western Calculation Additions and Deletions", a volume of "Re-formulation of Policy calculations and evidence", four volumes of "Elephant Number Peeping Yu", five volumes of "Simple Existence of Arithmetic", and one volume of "Easy to Know Calculation".
Someone else gave birth to a child, and she was studying astronomy:
In the early years, through the works of Zu Chongzhi, Zhang Heng and others, she never forgot the vast universe.
Even if there were no scientific instruments, even if the imperial court forbade the people to do scientific research, they could not stop her determination to engage in scientific research.
She used a lamp to hang on the beam of the room, acting as the sun, a round table as the earth, holding a round mirror as the moon, repeated observation and experimentation, and understood the principle of "lunar eclipse". All this was recorded by her in the article "Lunar Eclipse Solution".
This is the world's earliest accurate explanation of the cause of the lunar eclipse, completed by the 20-year-old Chinese girl in the 18th century.
She also insisted on observing the celestial phenomena every night, recording the trajectory of the planets, and writing the "Debate of the Stars" to correctly deduce the rotation direction of the five planets of gold, wood, water, fire and earth.
After being exposed to Copernicus's theory, she created The Circle of the Earth, the only scientist in the world who combined macroscopic and microscopic to explain why the human eye sees the "round place".
She also boldly refuted the argument of "the place where the sky is round": "On the earth where people live, each side is square, and everywhere they look at it is oblique, and wherever they stand, they should be tilted." ”
Her works in astronomy include "Astrological Illustrations", "Re-formulation of Policy Arithmetic Evidence", "Addition and Deletion of Western Calculations", "Simplified Almanac" and other astronomical calculation books.
Essays include "Precession to Doubt", "The Debate of Rising and Shrinking High and Low", "The Debate of the Stars", "The Debate of Huang Chi Er Dao", "The Theory of the Circle of the Earth", and "The Theory of the Wheel of The Year Set on the Earth's Center".
Everyone else's second child would hit soy sauce, and she began to study meteorology again:
When she saw the ants moving from low to high, she knew that the flood was coming, and quickly informed the farmers that the high-pole crop should be planted;
As soon as he saw that the white clouds were fish scale-like and there were no conical rain clouds, he immediately asked farmers to plant early crops to avoid drought.
After that, her neighbors often asked her about the weather when they went out or had anything to do, and the results she gave were comparable to "ink weather".
More than 200 years ago, China admired the Eight Strands of Literature, the Four Books and Five Classics, and there were only a few people who studied astronomy.
But if a woman wants to come in and insert a lever, how difficult is it for her to face?
It is tantamount to relying on the mother's fetus to be single and give birth to a child of your own.
The values of science also allowed her to see through the ignorance of feudal superstition:
In the famine years, her friend who believed in Buddhism begged her to write a preface to a Buddhist sutra, and she denounced the Buddhist path as nothingness, so instead of looting the people's cream and burning millions of dollars to do some superficial work, it was better to donate the money to the victims;
Her father pays attention to funeral feng shui, and she bluntly said that the well-being of future generations does not look at feng shui, and must not indulge in the theory of reincarnation of ghosts and gods;
In view of the prevalence of alchemy in society, she also bluntly said: alchemy cultivation immortals, but self-deception, no benefit, but will be harmed.
Such remarks were tantamount to "rumors" at the time.
Almost single-handedly, she declared war on the stubborn ideas of society as a whole.
More people attacked her than she saw:
Some people laughed at her for "losing her boudoir"—look at you, you don't look like a woman anymore!
Some people ridicule her as a "boudoir fanatic with a good name" - what a crazy woman.
Wang Zhenyi doesn't care, what is the difference between men and women? Everyone is a human being, learning is not for men, women's wisdom is not worse than men' wisdom, and learning is just as beneficial to society.
Needless to say, in her time, even today, even if she is enlightened, there are still many criticisms of women who are different:
Some people accuse dancer Yang Liping of being unmarried and infertile, dissuading female boxing king Zhang Weili from "not fighting and killing, be a woman", mocking Olympic shot put champion Gong Lijiao is not like a woman...
It is not difficult to imagine how subversive and earth-shattering Wang Zhenyi's actions were at that time.
If we do not have a broad mind and foresight, how can we break through the limitations of the times and pursue scientific truths that cannot be seen or touched?
/03/
Another 7 years have passed, and Wang Zhenyi has long been the "Golden Saint (Leftover) Fighter" in the eyes of everyone.
Her neighbor's children were secretly in love, and she finally made progress in her marriage and made a big news.
She fell in love freely and married Zhan Ming, a poor talent who came from a poor family but understood her.
Zhan Mei admired Wang Zhenyi's full talent, and Wang Zhenyi liked his equal attitude towards women.
To say that the happiest is still Zhan Ming, because he finally married Aidou as a fan, and finally ate swan meat as a toad.
The two hit it off and decided to continue scientific research to the end after marriage, and Zhan Mei gave Wang Zhenyi a hand.
Wang Zhenyi's academic work "The First Collection of Defeng Pavilion" was completed by the husband and wife at this time.
Wang Zhenyi said that if he wanted to open a private school immediately, he would take a male disciple as an apprentice, and he would try to block the gossip of the outside world.
Zhan Ming is a good husband, but he appeared too late in Wang Zhenyi's world.
In the 4th year after marriage, perennial hard work, coupled with household chores, 29-year-old Wang Zhenyi died of illness before giving birth to a child.
A great woman, the enlightener of modern science, the martyr of the pursuit of truth, fell in the 29th spring and autumn of her life, shining and hurrying like a shooting star.
▲ Wang Zhenyi, played by Zhang Zifeng in the "National Treasure" column
Before her death, she used "Eagle on the Shelf" to express her resentment:
Sit in the autumn wind with your neck shrunk, and your ambitions are as cold as a skull.
When to take off jin Han, angrily turn over the moxiao.
The blame and criticism she has endured throughout her life has never stopped.
How she wanted to break free and soar freely into the clouds.
But in real life, it is so oppressive that even women have ridiculed their poetry compositions.
Before dying, this hardcore woman who had lived a lifetime also comforted her husband in a spitty manner:
"The king's door is thin, and there is nothing to do, I will die first, not for misfortune." It means that your family is blessed, I died before you, it is not too miserable, Xiao Zhan, you should not be too sad.
After Wang Zhenyi's death, her husband Zhan Ming has been sorting out and editing her manuscripts. A few years later, her husband also went with her.
According to statistics, Wang Zhenyi has written as many as 56 volumes in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, and poetry.
There are thirteen volumes of the "First Collection of Defengting", of which order, biography, record, book, debate, commentary, inscription, poem, word, text, fu and so on.
Her manuscript was handed over to her close friend Madame Ku on a last wish, and was transferred to Madame Ku's nephew, and then to a Nanjing bibliophile, and most of the works were lost without printing after many turns.
These academic achievements were brought to the West by missionaries, and she was known as "China's Marie Curie". But little is known in the country.
In her own time, because her thinking was too advanced, she challenged the interests of the feudal rulers and was regarded as an outlandish outlier.
Of course, there are also enlightened people who praise her life as a woman who pursues self-worth:
Yuan Ming, a great talent of the Qing Dynasty, praised her in the "Poetry of Suiyuan", "Tongguan" and "Dengtaidai" have the qijie atmosphere, not like the female stream." ”
The Qing Dynasty historian Qian Yiji praised in his preface to her "Simple Existence of Arithmetic": "It is only one person after Ban Huiji (Ban Zhao)".
Tongcheng scholar Xiao Mu commented on Wang Zhenyi in the "Biography of Lady Deqing": "Concurrently ziwen and martial arts, six arts bypass, Bo and able to be refined..."
She has crossed too many forbidden areas in her life.
"Learn to ride and shoot, through astrology, actuarial arithmetic, work poetry, good at painting, general medical science, and breaking etiquette."
In just 21 words, I ended my short but brilliant life.
More than 200 years ago, she looked up at the stars countless times, and no matter how she was ridiculed, she always adhered to the ambition of engaging in scientific research and never compromised.
Therefore, she has seen the most vast universe and has also broken free from the shackles of gender.
All my life is "open and hanging", and all my life is working hard to live myself.
I live up to the stars, not to live up to myself.