Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 3, Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth
Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 3, Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth

Author: Joseph Needham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1959

Total Pages: 1146

ISBN-13: 9780521058018

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After two volumes mainly introductory, Dr Needham now embarks upon his systematic study of the development of the natural sciences in China. The Sciences of the Earth follow: geography and cartography, geology, seismology and mineralogy. Dr Needham distinguishes parallel traditions of scientific cartography and religious cosmography in East and West, discussing orbocentric wheel-maps, the origins of the rectangular grid system, sailing charts and relief maps, Chinese survey methods, and the impact of Renaissance cartography on the East. Finally-and here Dr Needham's work has no Western predecessors-there are full accounts of the Chinese contribution to geology and mineralogy.

Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 7, The Social Background, Part 2, General Conclusions and Reflections
Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 7, The Social Background, Part 2, General Conclusions and Reflections

Author: Joseph Needham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-07-22

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780521087322

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It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China series. For nearly fifty years, Needham and his collaborators have revealed the ideals, concepts and achievements of China's scientific and technological traditions from the earliest times to about 1800 through this great enterprise. During his long working lifetime, Needham kept in draft various essays, some written with collaborators, in which he set out his broad views on the Chinese social and historical context. These essays, edited by one of his closest collaborators, Kenneth Robinson, are contained in the present volume. A reading of this material makes it possible to reconstruct the assumptions and problematics that underpinned and drove the Needham project throughout the nearly one half century during which he was at the helm. The documents gathered here reveal the intellectual foundations of one of the greatest scholarly enterprises of the twentieth century.

New World Secrets on Ancient Asian Maps
New World Secrets on Ancient Asian Maps

Author: Charlotte Harris Rees

Publisher: Light Messages Publishing

Published: 2014-07-02

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1611531098

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Charlotte Harris Rees is an independent researcher, a retired federal employee, and an honors graduate of Columbia International University. She has diligently studied the possibility of very early arrival of Chinese to America. In 2003 Rees and her brother took the Harris Map Collection to the Library of Congress where it remained for three years while being studied. In 2006 she published an abridged version of her father's, The Asiatic Fathers of America: Chinese Discovery and Colonization of Ancient America. Her Secret Maps of the Ancient World came out in 2008. In 2011 she released Chinese Sailed to America Before Columbus: More Secrets from the Dr. Hendon M. Harris, Jr. Map Collection. In 2013 she published Did Ancient chinese Explore America? Her books are listed by World Confederation of Institutes and Libraries for Chinese Overseas Studies.

Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions
Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions

Author: Nicholas Campion

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2012-06-11

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0814708420

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When you think of astrology, you may think of the horoscope section in your local paper, or of Nancy Reagan's consultations with an astrologer in the White House in the 1980s. Yet almost every religion uses some form of astrology: some way of thinking about the sun, moon, stars, and planets and how they hold significance for human lives on earth. Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions offers an accessible overview of the astrologies of the world's religions, placing them into context within theories of how the wider universe came into being and operates. Campion traces beliefs about the heavens among peoples ranging from ancient Egypt and China, to Australia and Polynesia, and India and the Islamic world. Addressing each religion in a separate chapter, Campion outlines how, by observing the celestial bodies, people have engaged with the divine, managed the future, and attempted to understand events here on earth. This fascinating text offers a unique way to delve into comparative religions and will also appeal to those intrigued by New Age topics.

Making the New World Their Own
Making the New World Their Own

Author: Qiong Zhang

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-05-26

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 9004284389

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In Making the New World Their Own, Qiong Zhang offers a systematic study of how Chinese scholars in the late Ming and early Qing came to understand that the earth is shaped as a globe. This notion arose from their encounters with Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni and other Jesuits. These encounters formed a fascinating chapter in the early modern global integration of space. It unfolded as a series of mutually constitutive and competing scholarly discourses that reverberated in fields from cosmology, cartography and world geography to classical studies. Zhang demonstrates how scholars such as Xiong Mingyu, Fang Yizhi, Jie Xuan, Gu Yanwu, and Hu Wei appropriated Jesuit ideas to rediscover China’s place in the world and reconstitute their classical tradition. Winner of the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) "2015 Academic Excellence Award"

The Cambridge History of Ancient China
The Cambridge History of Ancient China

Author: Michael Loewe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-03-13

Total Pages: 1192

ISBN-13: 9780521470308

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The Cambridge History of Ancient China provides a survey of the institutional and cultural history of pre-imperial China.

History Of Mathematical Sciences: Portugal And East Asia Ii - Scientific Practices And The Portuguese Expansion In Asia (1498-1759)
History Of Mathematical Sciences: Portugal And East Asia Ii - Scientific Practices And The Portuguese Expansion In Asia (1498-1759)

Author: Luis M R Saraiva

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2004-10-21

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 9814481556

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This book explores the interaction between Europe and East Asia between the 16th and the 18th centuries in the field of mathematical sciences, bringing to the fore the role of Portugal as an agent of transmission of European science to East Asia. It is an important contribution to understanding this fundamental period of scientific history, beginning with the arrival of Vasco da Gama in India in 1498 and ending with the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Portugal in 1759. The former event opened a new era in relations between Europe and Asia, in particular regarding the circulation of scientific knowledge, leading to major social and intellectual changes in both continents. The Society of Jesus controlled education in Portugal and in the Empire. It was central to the network of knowledge transmission until the Society was expelled from Portugal in 1759.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in:• Index to Social Sciences & Humanities Proceedings® (ISSHP® / ISI Proceedings)• Index to Social Sciences & Humanities Proceedings (ISSHP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator
Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator

Author: Keith Houston

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2023-08-22

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0393882152

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The hidden history of the pocket calculator—a device that ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, and went with us to the moon—and the mathematicians, designers, and inventors who brought it to life. Starting with hands, abacus, and slide rule, humans have always reached for tools to simplify math. Pocket-sized calculators ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, took us to the bottom of the ocean, and accompanied us to the moon. The pocket calculator changed our world, until it was supplanted by more modern devices that, in a cruel twist of irony, it helped to create. The calculator is dead; long live the calculator. In this witty mathematic and social history, Keith Houston transports readers from the nascent economies of the ancient world to World War II, where a Jewish engineer calculated for his life at Buchenwald, and into the technological arms race that led to the first affordable electronic pocket calculators. At every turn, Houston is a scholarly, affable guide to this global history of invention. Empire of the Sum will appeal to math lovers, history buffs, and anyone seeking to understand our trajectory to the computer age.