See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: [Link]

net/publication/266983506

Japanese mathematics

Article in Symmetry Culture and Science · January 2001

CITATIONS READS
0 7,639

1 author:

Hiroshi Okumura
being looking for
303 PUBLICATIONS 720 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Wasan Geometry View project

origami View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Hiroshi Okumura on 09 April 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 This information has been digitized for use in the Ethnomathematics Digital
Library (EDL), a program of Pacific Resources for Education and Learning
(PREL). The EDL is sponsored by the National Science Foundation as a part
of the National STEM Digital Library ([Link]).

JAPANESE MATHEMATICS

by
Hiroshi Okumura
Department of Information Engineering
Maebashi Institute of Technology
Maebashi Gunma, Japan

© Symmetry Foundation. Digitized 2004 by permission of publisher.

Okumura, H. (2001). Japanese Mathematics [Special issue of Symmetry: Culture and

Science]. Symmetry in Ethnomathematics, 12(1-2), 79-86. Budapest, Hungary:
International Symmetry Foundation.

This product was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a component of the National Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL), award number DUE0121749. Any
opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not
necessarily reflect the views of NSF.
 Symmetry: Culture and Science
Vol. 12, Nos. 1-2, 79-86, 2001

JAPANESE MATHEMATICS

Hiroshi Okumura

Address: Department of Information Engineering, Maebashi Institute of Technology, 460-1 Kamisadori

Maebashi Gunma 371-0816, Japan. E-mail: okumura@[Link].

1. INTRODUCTION

Japanese mathematics developed during the Edo period (1603-1867) is called wasan. It
is based on Chinese mathematics books brought back to Japan in late 16th century when
Hideyoshi, the ruler of Japan at the time, invaded the Korean peninsula. Takakazu (or
Kowa) Seki (1642?-1708) improved the Chinese way of algebraic calculation of one
determinate and made it possible to solve equations with a number of unknown. After
that Japanese mathematics developed very rapidly in its own original way.

There are two customs which accelerated the development of wasan. One is idai which
is a challenging problem at the end of wasan books. When wasan mathematicians
published a book, they proposed unsolved problems at the end of the book. Then others,
who succeeded in solving the problems, published their solutions with other challenging
problems at the end of their books. Seki’s attempt to improve algebraic calculation was
also made when he tried to solve such a challenging problem. Another custom is a
sangaku, a wooden tablet of mathematics. When people found interesting properties or
solved hard problems, they wrote them as problems on framed wooden boards and
dedicated them to a shrine or a temple. Then they would be hung under the roof. Most
such problems were geometric and the figures were beautifully drawn in color. It was
also a means to publish discoveries or to propose new problems.

Japan’s feudal government closed the country during the Edo period. But at the
beginning of the Meiji era (1868-1912) the new government opened the country and
adopted Western mathematics in the new schooling system. There after wasan followed
80 H. OKUMURA

a course of decline. In this article we will briefly demonstrate the mathematics of wasan
and will also show the position of wasan today. For extensive references see (Mikami
1913) and (Smith and Mikami 1914).

2. EXAMPLES

Roughly speaking wasan covers a part of analysis, number theory, combinatorics and
geometry. The area of circles, length of circular arcs, volume of intersecting solids,
solutions to indefinite equations and magic squares are popular wasan topics. Also
wasan mathematicians studied astronomy, surveying and the art of divination in many
cases. Though they studied certain aspects of some things deeply, they did not establish
theoretical systems. For example ellipses were studied often, but hyperbolas and
parabolas were not. Also rhombuses were considered often but parallelograms barring a
couple of exceptions, were not. Since almost all wasan books were written as problem
books following the tradition of Chinese mathematics books, it was not necessary to
treat particular topics. On the other hand there are also wasan books which treated
particular subjects (Okumura 1999, this journal). Most geometric problems attempt to
discover certain dimensions of geometric figures such as the radius of a circle, a major
(or minor) axis of an ellipse, the side of a square, etc.

Figure 1 Figure 2

Let’s examine some examples. Figure 1 shows a magic circle similar to a magic square
(Seki). It consists of n concentric circles and n lines through the center, where natural
numbers 1, 2, ..., 2n2+1 are located at the intersections of the circles and the lines so that
the sum of the numbers located on each of the circles and the center, is equal to the sum
 JAPANESE MATHEMATICS 81

of the numbers located on each of the lines. The idea comes from antecedent Chinese
books. Seki shows a general construction of magic circles.

In the early stages of wasan, the area of a circle and length of a circular arc were
popular problems. But in the later stage, the volume of intersecting solids and surface
areas were often considered. Figure 2 shows the Viviani’s problem in wasan: A sphere
of radius r is bored by two cylinders with the radii r/2 as in the figure. Find the volume
and the surface area of the remaining part (Uchida 1844).

Figure 3 Figure 4

Sangaku problems may be very useful and enjoyable in classrooms. But it also seems
that sangaku problems are still attractive mathematically today, since they are so
unhackneyed and challenging. Let us see two such problems.

Problem 1. Five circles of three different sizes touch as in Figure 3. Given the radius of
the largest circle, find the radius of the medium circle (Saitama prefectural library
1969). The answer is that the medium circle is half the size of the largest circle.

Problem 2. In a square PQRS, there are two circles touching SP and the incircle of the
square, where one of which touches PQ and the other touches RS. Let A be the point of
tangency of QR and the incircle and let the tangents of the two small circles through A
intersect the segment SP at B and C as in Figure 4. Given the inradius of the square, find
82 H. OKUMURA

the inradius of the circle in the triangle ABC (Hirayama and Matsuoka 1966). The
answer is that the medium circle is also half the size of the largest circle.

3. SANGAKU PROBLEMS TODAY

Most sangaku problems are proposed as problems and their final solutions. There are no
explanations about how we can derive the final solution. Hence it is of some worth to
solve the problem and to find the process in order to derive the final answer. On the
other hand we can sometimes find interesting properties or interesting configurations
from sangaku figures. An example can be seen in Okumura 1997. Here we will show
some such examples using the two sangaku problems mentioned in the previous section.

In Problem 1, there are three small congruent circles, two of which lie in the curvilinear
triangles made by the two external tangents and the medium circle. The other lies in one
of the curvilinear triangles made by the two larger circles and one of the external
tangents. The problem says that the ratio of the size of the two larger circles is 2:1.
Considering the problem, we found the following surprising fact (Okumura and
Sodeyama 1998): If there are two externally touching circles with different radii with
external common tangents and if there are 4n congruent small circles, n of which lie in
the curvilinear triangle made by the two external tangents and the medium circle, and 3n
of which lie in one of the curvilinear triangles made by the two larger circles and one of
the external tangents as in Figure 5, then the ratio of the size of the two larger circles is
4:1 for any natural number n. Figure 5 shows the cases for n = 1, 2.
 JAPANESE MATHEMATICS 83

Figure 5

In Problem 2, PQRS is a square. But if PQRS is a rhombus (see Figure 6), we can still
reach the same conclusion, that is, the incircle of the triangle ABC is half the size of the
incircle of the rhombus (Okumura and Nakajima 1998).

Figure 6

Another interesting result of this problem is a fractal image (see Figure 7), which is
made bases on the fact that the ratio of the size of the two inscribed circles in the
problem is 2:1. This provides an example of recursive computer programming. An
example using sangaku figures in computer animation can be seen in (Okumura, proc.
1999).

The author totally agrees with the following comments (Rigby 1999): There may be a
need for a book whose main aims are: (1) to reduce the need for repetitious proofs by
grouping related results together, (2) to simplify the presentation of results, (3) to
simplify proofs when possible, (4) to generalize some of the results, which can
sometimes lead to greater insight and to simpler proofs.
84 H. OKUMURA

Figure 7

4. WASAN TODAY

Most wasan books are written in Chinese, which makes them rather hard to read for
ordinary Japanese today. In addition to this, wasan books have scarcity value, making
them very expensive and difficult to find in bookstore. Even if we could find a library
where some wasan source materials are collected, they are still much more difficult to
read than other mathematics books. We have to settle certain bureaucratic mattes before
getting desired books. Therefore most Japanese have not seen wasan books. They know
the word wasan, but do not know what problems there are, even if they are mathematics
teachers. It is extremely regrettable that wasan is not so popular in Japan and is hardly
used in classroom lessons.

There are many wasan problems; some are interesting and some are not. Recently
Fukagawa published wasan problem books both in Japanese and in English with co-
authors (Fukagawa and Pedoe 1989; Fukagawa and Sokolowsky 1994). We can see
interesting problems in these books. But the difficulty to access wasan source material is
still unsettled. Only those who can see wasan source materials have been able to study
wasan for a long time. But a recent publication provides wasan source material in a set
of six CD-ROMs (Okumura 2001). Though the book of explanation is written in
Japanese, the main data consists of pictures in JPEG format so they can be seen on most
 JAPANESE MATHEMATICS 85

computers with any language. This set covers more than three hundreds wasan source
material. Also we can see several books of wasan and Chinese mathematics on the web
site of Kyoto University. There also are several web sites in English, where we can see
some sangaku problems. We can access these sites from most portal sites by using the
key word “sangaku”. We can see wasan source material more easily than before, but
there are still many aspects of wasan which need to be studied both historically and
mathematically.

REFERENCES

Fukagawa, H. and Pedoe, D. (1989) Japanese Temple Geometry Problems, Winnipeg, Canada: Charles
Babbage Research Center.
Fukagawa, H. and Sokolowsky, D. (1994) Japanese mathematics - how many problems can you solve?,
Tokyo, Japan: Morikita Shuppan (in Japanese).
Hirayama, H. and Matsuoka, M. (1966) The sangaku in Yamagata (private publication in Japanese).
Mikami, Y. (1913) The development of Mathematics in China and Japan, Chelsea, N.Y.
Okumura, H. (1997) Circle patterns arising from results in Japanese geometry, Symmetry: Culture and Science
8, Number 1, 4-23.
Okumura, H. and Sodeyama, C. (1998) A surprising property of successively touching circles, Mathematics
Plus, Number 3, 17-18 (in Bulgarian).
Okumura, H. and Nakajima, E. (1998) Incircles of rhombuses, Mathematics and Informatics Quarterly 8
Number 3, 143-148.
Okumura, H. (1999) Mathematical study of wasan geometry, Proc. of the 4th international symposium on the
history of mathematics and mathematics education using Chinese characters, 129-138.
Okumura, H. (1999) Geometries in the East and the West in the 19th century, Symmetry: Culture and Science
9, Number 1-2, 189-197.
Okumura, H., ed. (2001) Wasansho Shusei (wasan collection), Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo (in Japanese).
Rigby, J. (1999) Some Western thoughts on traditional Japanese mathematics, Proc. of the 4th international
symposium on the history of mathematics and mathematics education using Chinese characters, 163-
175.
Saitama prefectural library (1969) The sangaku in Saitama, Saitama prefectural Library, Saitama Japan (in
Japanese).
Seki, Hojin no ho ensan no ho (apograph).
Smith, D. E. and Mikami, Y. (1914) A history of Japanese mathematics, Open Court, Chicago.
Uchida (1844) Sampo Kyuseki Tsuko.

View publication stats