The History of Chinese Mathematics—the Founding of the IHNS (CAS)—and the True Story of a Wrong Diagram inSCC Volume 3

The Institute for the History of Natural Sciences in Beijing celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of its founding in 1957 with an international symposium devoted to 'China and the World in the Global History of Science and Technology.'2This contribution to that symposium focuses on the roles that historians of mathematics, East and West, have played in bringing the importance of mathematics in China to the attention of the world at large. It concludes by discussing a controversy surrounding the diagram and purported 'proof' given in the ancient mathematical classic, theZhoubi suanjing周髀算經 (Mathematical classic of Zhou’s gnomon), of thegou-gutheorem that appeared in volume 3 of Joseph Needham’sScience and Civilisation in China, published in 1959.