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Concept
Seki Takakazu
Summary
, also known as Seki Kōwa, was a Japanese mathematician and author of the Edo period.
Seki laid foundations for the subsequent development of Japanese mathematics, known as wasan. He has been described as "Japan's Newton".
He created a new algebraic notation system and, motivated by astronomical computations, did work on infinitesimal calculus and Diophantine equations. Although he was a contemporary of German polymath mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and British polymath physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton, Seki's work was independent. His successors later developed a school dominant in Japanese mathematics until the end of the Edo period.
While it is not clear how much of the achievements of wasan are Seki's, since many of them appear only in writings of his pupils, some of the results parallel or anticipate those discovered in Europe. For example, he is credited with the discovery of Bernoulli numbers. The resultant and determinant (the first in 1683, the complete version no later than 1710) are attributed to him.
Seki also calculated the value of pi correct to the 10th decimal place, having used what is now called the Aitken's delta-squared process, rediscovered later by Alexander Aitken.
Seki has been influenced by Japanese mathematics books such as the Jinkōki.
Not much is known about Seki's personal life. His birthplace has been indicated as either Fujioka in Gunma Prefecture, or Edo. His birth date ranges from 1635 to 1643.
He was born to the Uchiyama clan, a subject of Ko-shu han, and adopted into the Seki family, a subject of the shōgun. While in Ko-shu han, he was involved in a surveying project to produce a reliable map of his employer's land. He spent many years in studying 13th-century Chinese calendars to replace the less accurate one used in Japan at that time.
His mathematics (and wasan as a whole) was based on mathematical knowledge accumulated from the 13th to 15th centuries. The material in these works consisted of algebra with numerical methods, polynomial interpolation and its applications, and indeterminate integer equations.
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