Cultural Mathematics anf Fascination in China

9 Janvier 2015

There has always been a great fascination with numbers in China.

According to a Legend, the first souverain of China : the Yellow Emperor created mathematics with one of his deitys in 2800 BC. He was believing that numbers could help cause make significant. Nowadays, the Chinese still believe in the mystical powers of numbers :

Odd numbers represent male
Even numbers stand for female
The number 4 has to be avoided at all costs
And 8 brings good fortune

In China, the early version of sudoku has been developped. They are called magic squares and a Legend says 5000 years ago, a sacred turtle came out of the Yellow river to see the Emperor Yu with a magic square on his back.

Then, they created even more bigger magic squares with more mathematical and magical powers.

All the sums of the sizes and diagonals of the square make 15