Chinese mathematics: some bibliographic comments (Q1085144)

The history of Chinese mathematics is no longer in its childhood. Papers and books from various scholars are published almost everywhere, both in western languages and in oriental languages. Some authors already undertook bibliographies, in order to help specialists. However, non specialists are often lost for lack of commentaries in such bibliographies. This is the reason why, in ibid. 11, 39-56 (1984; Zbl 0536.01004), \textit{F. J. Swetz} and \textit{T. S. Ang} published ''A brief chronological and bibliographical guide to the history of Chinese mathematics''. They were listing about 120 works. But this was certainly not an exhaustive list. In the present paper the author, who wrote with \textit{B. A. Rosenfeld} Die Mathematik der Länder des Ostens im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1960; Zbl 0099.242), provides in addition to the bibliography of Swetz and Ang 23 more titles, including recent Russian publications. The paper ends with short remarks on the sums of squares of integers (The date following Liu Hui should be read 261). It is perhaps the convenient place to add that \textit{J. C. Martzloff} published earlier a very useful paper for the researchers. It appeared in Hist. Sci. 28, 1-30 (1985; Zbl 0577.01005) and contains a large bulk of papers due to Chinese scholars, mainly in Chinese language. Thus 241 papers are listed along with 20 books: very short commentaries are added and there is also a convenient index to find out which subjects are treated under the various titles. It is worth mentioning that a report by \textit{Li Di} was also given at the 17th Int. Congr. Hist. Sci., Berkeley (1985). It was presented at the symposium: Transmission of mathematics, organized by Scriba and the reviewer. Its title was: A report on the circumstances for Chinese scholars to research the History of Chinese mathematics in the last three years.