Author: Our special invited author Canghai Mingyuesheng
The peach blossom shadow fell on the flying sword, and the blue sea tide was born according to the jade reed.
This is the martial arts portrayal of Huang Yaoshi, the lord of Peach Blossom Island, in the "Legend of the Eagle Shooter", in addition to the martial arts of the gods, this arrogant master is all exquisite in astronomical geography, five elements of bagua, Qimen Dunjia, Qinqi calligraphy and painting, and even farmland water conservancy, which can be called a compound type of school bully.
"The Legend of the Eagle Hero" is Jin Yong's famous work, with the competition between the three forces of the Southern Song Dynasty, Mongolia and jinguo as the historical background. In the novel, Huang Yaoshi appears around the time of the reign of Song Ningzong, the fourth emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty.
Coincidentally, in the history of this period, there was also a multi-talented scholar who came out. He was skilled in bow and sword, and was proficient in astrological rhythms, arithmetic poetry, and architectural construction. What is more in line is that Huang Yaoshi is regarded as a madman who is also good and evil, and this scholar was once recognized by the world as a bad villain, but hundreds of years later, he was collectively admired by the scientific community on the other side of the ocean.
The same talent, the same mixed reputation. In addition to not having a daughter who is ice and snow smart, this school bully can almost be regarded as the prototype of the Yellow Medicine Master in the novel.
He was the famous mathematician Qin Jiushao of the Southern Song Dynasty, a genius who was delayed by his fame.
1. Heroic and military youth
Qin Jiushao was a native of Anyue, Sichuan, who was from a family of officials and eunuchs, and his father, Qin Jiqi, was born as a jinshi. In 1219, Qin Jiqi, who was in charge of Bazhong, encountered a mutiny by a sergeant, and he had to flee with his family and abandon the city. After several years of wandering, Qin Jiqi went to the capital city of Lin'an, and the imperial court not only did not punish him but promoted him to the prefect of Tongchuan and ordered him to return to Sichuan with his family.
Qin Jiushao's legend began at this time, when he was 18 years old, at the age of boiling blood.
At this time, the Southern Song Dynasty simultaneously guarded against the strong enemies of the Mongols and the Jin Dynasty in the northwest. Under the Fast Horse Machete of Mongolia, most of Shaanxi and Gansu have been broken. Tongchuan was regarded as a strategic place because of its rugged terrain, so the imperial court specially recruited thousands of elite militiamen from the southwest, accompanied the army to resist the enemy in wartime, and built fortifications as a civilian husband in his spare time. The leader of this civilian armed force was the young Qin Jiushao.
To lead such a team, Qin Jiushao definitely had two brushes. He was intelligent and studious by nature, and when he was a teenager, he studied a large number of astronomical calendar texts and immersed himself in civil engineering, which translated into his skills for settling down, and his sergeants were convinced of this.
Qin Jiushao is a typical child of someone else's family. Not only did he have excellent theoretical knowledge, but his military quality was also quite excellent, and his equestrianism, riding and shooting, and swordsmanship were very slippery, so that people at that time evaluated him in an envious tone: "Games, hammers, horses, bows, swords, can not be known."
In 1236, the Mongol army invaded Chengdu, and most of the state capitals in Sichuan fell. In the previous series of battles, Qin Jiushao showed the quality of a professional soldier, often braving the rain of arrows to command freely, just as he later recalled: "The years are far cold, and I don't care about it all in the lost stones."
If life follows such a trajectory, Qin Jiushao, who threw himself into the military camp, will most likely end up dying for the country. However, with the transfer from the battlefield to the local area, Qin Jiushao finally made a difference in the field of mathematics.
Second, mathematical genius
During his tenure in Sichuan, Qin Jiushao had already shown extraordinary talent in mathematics.
The Chronicle of Yixian records a story in June 1231, when torrential rains broke out along the Yin River, two farmers quarreled over the boundaries of the fields washed away by the floods. After on-site investigation, Qin Jiushao found that the "three oblique field blocks" with their respective triangles together were washed into irregular fields by the flood. So, using his rich knowledge of geometry, he calculated the area of the field and divided it equally into boundaries that satisfied both of them.
In addition, the folk also left many masterpieces of Qin Jiushao, such as a "Dao Ancient Bridge" in Hangzhou Xixi, which was designed and built by him. For Qin Jiushao, these were just small tests of cattle knives, and what really made him famous was a strange book called "Nine Chapters of the Book of Numbers".
In 1244, Qin Jiushao, who was serving as a judge in Nanjing, returned to his hometown to keep filial piety for three years due to the death of his mother. Far from political turmoil, he found that the farther the year, the greater the error of the calendar, and the root cause of it was that the arithmetic was not accurate enough. To this end, he spent three years to complete more than 200,000 words of "Nine Chapters of the Book of Numbers", which caused a sensation as soon as it came out.
Even today, hundreds of years later, the knowledge contained in this "Nine Chapters of the Book of Numbers" is enough to make the scum of the students crazy.
For example, the "three-slope product" in the book is to know the length of the three sides of the triangle, to find the area of the triangle, there is no geometric knowledge really can not start. Amazingly, the formula summarized by Qin Jiushao is almost identical to the algorithm in contemporary textbooks. Moreover, the proposition of the ratio ratio and the chain ratio proposed by him still has strong practical significance.
The Nine Chapters of the Book of Numbers has 9 categories, including content related to social life, such as time and time, field domain, testing, conscription, and military service. In the 9 categories, 9 questions were raised, a total of 81 mathematical problems, Qin Jiushao not only raised questions in the book, but also carefully described the principles and steps of the problems, and gave the answers while also extending the ideas.
If there is mathematics in the Imperial Examination of the Southern Song Dynasty, this "Nine Chapters of Mathematics" is definitely a popular book that sells out of stock, and may even be a copy of the children's hand, which is equivalent to the contemporary "Olympic Number".
The content of the Nine Chapters of the Book of Numbers covers mathematics courses in today's junior high schools and even universities. In addition to decimals, complex numbers, there are also least common multiples, algebraic operations, higher-order equations, and so on.
This work represents the highest level of mathematical development in the medieval world, in which the "Great Derivative One Technique" is 554 years ahead of the Western mathematician Gauss, and the "positive and negative opening technique" is 572 years earlier than the English mathematician Horner's solution. The modern mathematician Liang Zongju once commented on the Nine Chapters of the Book of Numbers: "At that time, the long night in Europe was not over, but the creation of Chinese shone like a rising sun in the East. ”
Third, the reputation is mixed
In 1248, the famous Qin Jiushao was summoned and appreciated by Emperor Lizong of Song, and he became the first mathematician in Chinese history to be summoned by the emperor.
After that, Qin Jiushao was promoted to the jiangnan area to serve as a fat shortage, and the smoke of the sound and color of dogs and horses made him gradually lose himself in the official field and transform into a great evil person who was criticized by his colleagues.
Qin Jiushao was still a literary youth in his early years and wrote good words, so he met Liu Kezhuang, a lyricist in the late Southern Song Dynasty. Liu Kezhuang's words were bold and full of patriotic feelings, but after Qin Jiushao became famous, he was violently attacked by Liu Kezhuang.
After the propaganda of this literary celebrity, Qin Jiushao was inhumane, unjust, filial piety, and incorruptible," and even later public opinion personally attacked him, saying that he was 'as violent as a tiger and a wolf, as poisonous as a snake and scorpion, and not as a human being." Even more bizarre is the phrase "If you store more poison, if you don't like it, you will be poisoned by it."
Under the rendering of many words, Qin Jiushao's notoriety seems to have been hammered.
In these records, Qin Jiushao ran amok among the people of the township and was repeatedly dismissed; he used his expertise in mathematics to seize his superiors' field property; more dramatically, Qin Jiushao ordered his subordinates to kill his own son, and for this reason carefully designed three schemes of poisoning, drowning, and self-cutting with swords.
Catching up with such a snake and scorpion-hearted father, his subordinates felt that they were too perverted to do so, and secretly released his son, and Qin Jiushao actually offered a huge reward to hunt him down after learning about it.
Judging from Qin Jiushao's career experience, he was shrewd in calculating and indulging in official power struggles, and he was by no means a good stubble, but Liu Kezhuang, who smeared him, was not a moral model. The political arena of the Southern Song Dynasty has always been divided into the main war faction and the main peace faction, Qin Jiushao and the Privy Council envoy Wu Qian have a deep friendship, advocating the use of force to resist the Mongols, but Liu Kezhuang, who sang patriotic songs in his words, relied on the powerful minister Jia Xiangdao and actively rushed to be the advocate who slandered the main war faction.
4. Mourning after death
In 1268, Qin Jiushao, who was relegated to Meizhou, Guangdong, died in mourning. Due to the excessive public opinion attacks he encountered before his death, after Qin Jiushao's death, the "History of Song" and all the local chronicles did not establish a biography for him, and even the current academic community regarded him as a genius with a moral stain.
In a sense, the tragedy of Qin Jiushao is also a microcosm of the tragedy of the Southern Song Dynasty court, and if the parties ignore the fortunes of the country and attack each other because of their political disagreements, then the disaster of national subjugation is not far away.
In the eighth year after Qin Jiushao's death, the Southern Song Dynasty collapsed.
It is lamentable that Qin Jiushao, who was not recognized by the mainstream values of ancient China, has received unprecedented respect in the eyes of Western scientists. The famous German historian of mathematics Cantor praised him as "the luckiest genius", and the famous American historian of science Sutton believed that "Qin Jiushao was his people, one of the greatest mathematicians of his time".
Time flies, and today's Anyue County has built a memorial hall for Qin Jiushao and has become the first batch of patriotic education bases in the local area. After hundreds of years, this prodigious genius has finally been remembered by the world with a glorious and positive image.
References: "History of the Song Dynasty", "Nine Chapters of the Book of Numbers", "Records of Yin County", "Commentary on Qin Jiushao"
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