scholarly journals Reading instructions of the past, classifying them, and reclassifying them: commentaries on the canon The Nine Chapters on Mathematical Procedures from the third to the thirteenth centuries

BJHS Themes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 15-37
Author(s):  
Karine Chemla

AbstractThis essay approaches the knowledge required to write up and use instructions with a specific method. It relies on specific procedures taken from the Chinese canon The Nine Chapters on Mathematical Procedures (九章算術), which, in the author's view, was completed in the first century CE. These procedures enabled readers to do things. To analyse the type of knowledge required to produce these texts of procedures and to use them, the essay puts into play two layers of commentary. The ancient layer was written between the third and the seventh centuries, whereas the later layer was composed between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. The author shows that these two layers of commentary read the same text of procedure differently, using different approaches and understanding it differently. The author also shows how the two layers of commentary use mathematical problems to approach a procedure, even though problems are used differently in the two contexts. This illustrates how, in different contexts, actors interpreted the same instructional text differently, both with respect to what the text meant and with respect to how one could make sense of it.

1982 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Barton Worthington

The historical perspective is becoming ever more important in scientific research and development—especially in regions of rapid political and social change, such as former colonial empires, where the past is readily forgotten. Therefore this essay attempts to reconstruct the evolution of Ecology as the scientific basis for environmental conservation and human progress, as seen through the eyes of a biologist who has exercised that science during a number of tasks in various parts of the world over most of the twentieth century.From its beginnings in evolutionary thinking during the nineteenth century, ecology emerged from natural history at the beginning of the twentieth. At first the running was made by botanists; but this was soon followed by zoologists, who dealt with more mobile communities. The first quarter-century was mainly exploratory; the second was mainly descriptive (although biological exploration was still dominant in the tropics). The third quarter saw ecology developing into an experimental science, and, as the environmental revolution got into its stride, ecology became organized both nationally and internationally.Although the term is now often misused and sometimes misunderstood by laymen, the last quarter-century is seeing the wide application of ecology in environmental and human affairs, and this gives some assurance that the twenty-first century will not become one of chaos. The Author expresses the hope that experienced practising ecologists will in future give higher priority to applying what they already know than to learning more and more about less and less.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 004
Author(s):  
Alberto Venegas Ramos

Along the last years we have assisted to the release of a great number of videogames set in the past as, for example, Assassin’s Creed: Origins (Ubisoft, 2017). This game offered the player the possibility to tour the city of Alexandria during the first century before Christ. My intention in this text is to develop the use of the past in the reconstruction of urban digital spaces through three video-game sagas, BioShock (Irrational Games y 2K Marin, 2007 – 2013), Uncharted (Naughty Dog, 2006 – 2017) and Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft, 2007 – 2017). Each one of them will serve us to develop and examine the aesthetic uses of the past in the reconstruction of urban digital spaces through the proposed concepts: design, consumption and production. Irrational Games’ saga will help us to understand the first concept, the Naughty Dog one the second and the Ubisoft one the third. After these three sections we will elaborate a final section where we will build the video-game as a mass culture medium with other media of same scope and shared features.


1929 ◽  
Vol 14 (200) ◽  
pp. 379-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Clare Archibald

While major mathematical problems were discussed already in the seventeenth century in such serial publications as the Philosophical Transactions (1665) and Acta Eruditorum (1682), it was not till the early part of the eighteenth century that serials containing elementary problems of wide appeal commenced to appear. The first of these seems to have been the Lady’s Diary, started in London in 1704, and “designed for the sole use of the female sex”. It had an immediate success, and continued to appear in various forms for 168 consecutive years. Of the second, Delights for the Ingenious, there were only eight numbers, in 1711. The third publication of the kind was possibly Kunstfrüchte 1. Sammlung (1723), a publication (I have not seen it) of the Hamburg mathematical society, founded thirty-three years before. The Jahrbriefe of this same society were published irregularly during the 140 years 1732-1871. For the fifth and sixth publications we come back to England, Miscellanece Curiosce (York, 1734-35) and Gentleman’s Diary, started in 1741 and continued for a century before its union with the Ladies’ Diary. Then followed five other English serials before Holland’s Mathematische Liefhebberye (Purmerende, 1754), issued annually for seventeen years. During the next 175 years the number of these minor publications became very large. It is my purpose to bring together brief notes on minor English serials and their editors of the past two and a quarter centuries, and to indicate where more information regarding them may be found. It will not be possible, within the limits of this article, to indicate more than very occasionally anything of the contents (often rich and varied) of such serials, many results appearing in their pages for the first time. Problems and their solutions usually occupied the greater part of the space, and most of the prominent English mathematicians of the time were contributors. While some may incline to frown upon such mathematical occupations, it may be recalled that “Sätze und Aufgaben” were to be found in such an exalted source as Crelle’s Journal, so recently as 1858.


2021 ◽  
Vol 233 ◽  
pp. 01156
Author(s):  
Tongye Wang

Japan is known as a highly developed capitalist country. It was the third largest economy in the world by the end of 2017 and is one of the members of G7 and G20. Thus, for academic purpose, it is worth to discuss how Japan could expand the scale of its economy in different kinds of effective ways in the past half a century. This paper will talk about the main factors to influence the Japanese economy from post-war period to twenty-first century. The Solow-Swan model is used to target on explaining the factors that influence the long-run economic development in an economy. To present the effects that was brought by the past policies, both total GDP calculation and GDP per capita calculation are adopted as the evidence of economic success of Japan.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Mendes

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-171
Author(s):  
Nāṣir Al-Dīn Abū Khaḍīr

The ʿUthmānic way of writing (al-rasm al-ʿUthmānī) is a science that specialises in the writing of Qur'anic words in accordance with a specific ‘pattern’. It follows the writing style of the Companions at the time of the third caliph, ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān, and was attributed to ʿUthmān on the basis that he was the one who ordered the collection and copying of the Qur'an into the actual muṣḥaf. This article aims to expound on the two fundamental functions of al-rasm al-ʿUthmānī: that of paying regard to the ‘correct’ pronunciation of the words in the muṣḥaf, and the pursuit of the preclusion of ambiguity which may arise in the mind of the reader and his auditor. There is a further practical aim for this study: to show the connection between modern orthography and the ʿUthmānic rasm in order that we, nowadays, are thereby able to overcome the problems faced by calligraphers and writers of the past in their different ages and cultures.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-224
Author(s):  
ʿĀʾiḍ B. Sad Al-Dawsarī

The story of Lot is one of many shared by the Qur'an and the Torah, and Lot's offer of his two daughters to his people is presented in a similar way in the two books. This article compares the status of Lot in the Qur'an and Torah, and explores the moral dimensions of his character, and what scholars of the two religions make of this story. The significance of the episodes in which Lot offers his daughters to his people lies in the similarities and differences of the accounts given in the two books and the fact that, in both the past and the present, this story has presented moral problems and criticism has been leveled at Lot. Context is crucial in understanding this story, and exploration of the ways in which Lot and his people are presented is also useful in terms of comparative studies of the two scriptures. This article is divided into three sections: the first explores the depiction of Lot in the two texts, the second explores his moral limitations, and the third discusses the interpretations of various exegetes and scholars of the two books. Although there are similarities between the Qur'anic and Talmudic accounts of this episode, it is read differently by scholars from the two religions because of the different contexts of the respective accounts.


Author(s):  
Josh Kun

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Hazem Hamad Mousa Al Janabi

Tripartite Negotiating philosophy: (strategy - tactics - technique) At the beginning , the research consists of four sections as follows: The first axis titled: "what negotiation", and the second axis: "philosophy of negotiation," The third axis titled: "negotiation strategy". Down to the fourth axis which included titled: "negotiating tactic", Sajama with the past and as a supplement came fifth axis titled: "negotiating technique", to be the bottom line in the form of a set of conclusions. Negotiation consists of a base triple hierarchical strategy - tactics - technique. The philosophy of negotiating interactive basis of rationality. Negotiable three parties are the position and the case and the parties involved. Is the process of negotiating strategic recruitment capacity and capabilities to achieve the desired goal of the crisis prematurely. Negotiating tactic is the process of hiring capacity and capabilities to achieve the desired goal at the negotiating table. •The technique is the process of negotiating employment capacity and capabilities to achieve the desired goal at the negotiating table to contain thesudden things check response and renewed flexibility.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document