The "Ten Dynasties New Language Edition" praised her like this: "Jiading Qian Daxin emphasized his learning, thinking that ban zhao would be alone after him." "Wang Zhenyi has been a talented woman since childhood, although she is unknown and died early, but her contribution to the country is indelible, although she is strange to us, but she has amazed the world for more than two hundred years, enough for my learning."
Her life is like a grand firework, short and brilliant, illuminating the sky, frozen in people's hearts, although only for a short moment, but the beauty of that moment has become eternal, shocking people's hearts, and can never be erased. She was revered as "Madame Curie of ancient China", and she was Wang Zhenyi.
Wang Zhenyi was born in 1768 and was a famous female scientist in the Qing Dynasty. In China, there may be many people who are not familiar with the name, but she is a rare and glorious pearl abroad. To the surprise of the Chinese, they also named the asteroid after her and wrote hymns for her. She has too many treasures on her body, waiting for us to dig them up.
Wang Yizhen's grandfather was Xuanhua Taishou Wang Zhifu, a good and superior family background, so that she had the conditions to read a lot of books, coupled with her amazing talent, from an early age with the hat of a genius girl. Her grandfather was well versed in the calendar and collected many books on this subject. When she was eleven, she went to Jilin with her grandmother to mourn her grandfather, where she lived for 5 years, which gave her the opportunity to read a large collection of books by her grandfather, and under the influence of these books, she developed a great interest in astronomical and geographical almanacs, thus laying the foundation for her subsequent scientific research journey.
When she was eighteen, she traveled with her grandmother and father to study, and went to Beijing, Hubei and other places. The study tour allowed her to browse many scenic spots and historical sites, deeply contact with many social realities, bring her great feelings, and increase her insight, accumulate experience, and also meet her husband Zhan Mei.
Her love for science did not disappear after becoming a parent with her husband, nor did she teach her husband and children at home like ordinary women, but she studied tirelessly and continued to conduct scientific experiments. When she conducted experiments, she often shut herself in the house, sat for several days at a time, and often forgot to eat. At that time there were no sophisticated scientific instruments, but this did not bother her, she picked up the tool and made it into the existing material.
It is said that one day, Wang Yizhen was doing experiments in the room, for several days, she had not gone out to eat, her mother was very worried, so she was curious to look inside through the crack in the door, and saw that the lamp on the table was hung on the beam of the room as the sun, the small round table was placed under the lamp as the earth, and the mirror on the dresser was held in her hand as the moon. Using these rudimentary tools, she kept experimenting and figuring out astronomical phenomena such as lunar eclipses. She left behind in her work "Lunar Eclipse Solution" to expound this astronomical knowledge.
She is not only interested in astronomy, but also in mathematics. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China formed the Anhui school of mathematics represented by Mei Wending and Mei Jue, and Wang Yizhen, whose ancestral home was Anhui, was also one of them. In mathematical research, she combined the advantages of Chinese and Western algorithms, and was not affected by the old methods and old ideas of the time, and improved them to make mathematical algorithms more simplistic. Her work "Pythagorean Trigonometry" tells her views and ideas in mathematical research.
As an ancient scientist, Wang Yizhen's path is undoubtedly arduous, and she not only has to overcome the problems in scientific instruments, but also fights against feudal society and feudal ethical ideas. In that feudal era, as a talented woman who studied both Chinese and Western, and who was familiar with ancient and modern times, she was considered an outlier in the society at that time, so she was ridiculed by many feudal apologists, who believed that as a girl, she should teach her husband and children at home, cook and sew, rather than obsessing over scientific experiments all day, these things should be done by boys. After listening to these ridicules, Wang Yizhen did not give in, but became more and more frustrated and courageous, and made great achievements on the road of scientific research.
Although certain achievements have been made, there are still many people who do not understand her and think that she is talking nonsense, but she still insists on herself, and also speaks up for the status of women, refuting these people's views in her own articles and straightening herself out. Her spirit of insisting on herself and adhering to her authenticity is also very admirable today.
It was such a talented woman who did not succumb to the eyes of the world, and died of illness when she was twenty-nine years old. This was a loss to the scientific community at that time, and it was also a loss to China's future. If she had been born in modern society, she would have been a great scientist, but she was born in the feudal era and could only write her research theories in books, and even if she shared them, not many people understood her.
Although many of the theoretical works she left for us have been lost, the spirit she left for us is indelible, and one of the sentences she once wrote is the best commentary on her spirit: "The same person is also the same heart." "And it is gratifying that in today's era of developed information networks, her story is known to more and more people, and her spirit will be passed on with the development of the times."