Li Shanlan (AD 1811-1882), courtesy name Renshu and alias Qiuren, was born in Haining, Zhejiang Province into a scholarly family. He loved mathematics as a boy. When she was ten years old, Li Shanlan "stole" the famous ancient Chinese mathematics book "Nine Chapters on Arithmetic" from the bookshelf when she was studying in a private school. She "read" it and solved all 426 numerical problems in the book just by relying on the annotations in the book. , Since then, Li Shanlan's interest in mathematics has become more intense. When she was fifteen years old, Li Shanlan was fascinated by the "Elements of Geometry" co-translated by Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi, and fully understood its meaning. Unfortunately, Xu and Li did not translate the later more difficult volumes. Li Shanlan deeply regretted it and often fantasized about it. There are "good people or sailing translations", so that you can get a glimpse of the whole thing. In the second year of Xianfeng's reign, he arrived in Shanghai and got acquainted with British missionaries William Alexander and Joseph Joseph. They admired Li Shanlan's talents and invited him to Mohai Academy to translate Western Gezhi's book. Mohai Academy was founded by British missionary John Mads. This library was originally set up for missionary work. Later, the translation work expanded from religious books to the field of Western science and technology. Guo Songtao passed through Shanghai before going to England and France and visited Mohai Academy. He wrote in his diary:
The next time I went to Mohai Academy, there was a man named Mai Dusi, a Western missionary who called himself Old Man Mohai. There is a worship temple in front of the residence, and there are many books in the back hall. There is a ball under the east and west windows, with the celestial sphere on the right and the earth on the left. Mai Jun was very diligent in writing books, and one of his ministers and editors was Li Renshu (that is, Li Shanlan) of Haiyan... Li Junyan was a scholar of Pythagorean studies.
After Li Shanlan arrived at Mohai Academy, he took the lead in cooperating with Wei Lie Yali to translate the last nine volumes of "Elements of Geometry" to continue the unfinished work of Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi. The book "Elements" is mostly translated in full in Western countries. Although there is a complete version translated from Greek into English in the UK, due to rough translation and collation, false errors are common. "The loss of a thousand miles is nothing." Even Wei Lie Yali himself admitted, "I am ashamed of Jian Chou. Although I grew up in the West, I am not very advanced in this skill and I dare not make any rash judgments." The English version can only be read as written and translated into Chinese, and the errors must be corrected and verified by Li Shanlan based on his profound mathematical knowledge. Through the efforts of Wei Lie Yali and Li Shanlan for "four years of cold and summer", the translation of "Elements" was finally completed. Modern Western symbolic algebra, analytic geometry and calculus were transmitted for the first time using the complete version of "Elements" as the carrier. Enter our country.
The complete translation of "Elements of Geometry" is an arduous task. In the "Preface to the Continuation of the Translation of the Last Nine Volumes of Elements of Geometry", Li Shanlan said earnestly: "Later readers should not think that the complete version of the book has been imported into China." Just waiting for idle things." It contains the infinite sighs after experiencing all kinds of hardships. In the process of translating the whole book, Li Shanlan exerted great efforts. Wei Lie Yali once said humbly: "Deleting and correcting errors, reviewing them repeatedly and carefully, and showing that there are no flaws, then Li Jun's efforts were mostly, and I was able to borrow his help to complete it first." That’s it.” He also declared: "In the future, Western scholars will seek rare books, but they should seek Chinese ones instead." It can be seen that I am very satisfied with the quality of the translation.
During the translation process of the last nine volumes of "Elements of Geometry", Joseph also invited Li Shanlan to translate "Chongxue" by the British Hu Weili. The so-called "emphasis on learning" refers to mechanics. Therefore, Li Shanlan "translated geometry in the morning and emphasized learning in the evening." Although the "Emphasis on Learning" translated by Li Shanlan was only the middle part of the original document, the translated part introduced the general knowledge of mechanics in more detail. The three laws of Newtonian mechanics in the book were introduced to China for the first time.
In addition to the last nine volumes of "Elements of Geometry" and "Chongxue", Li Shanlan also co-translated another important scientific theory work with Wei Lie Yali, which is "Talk about the Sky". "Talk about the Sky" is an astronomy book, originally called "A Compendium of Astronomy", and its author is the famous British astronomer John Herschel. This book has a relatively detailed description of the structure of the solar system and planetary motion, including introductions to the law of universal gravitation, sunspot theory, planetary perturbation theory, comet orbit theory, etc.
In the seventh year of Tongzhi (1868), Li Shanlan was recommended by Guo Songtao and went to Beijing to serve as the chief teacher of the Tongwen Museum of Astronomy and Mathematics. The Astronomy and Mathematics Museum is equivalent to the current university mathematics department. Li Shanlan can be called a leader in the history of mathematics in my country. The first professor of mathematics, he taught in the Astronomy Museum for more than ten years, and taught more than a hundred people. He worked until he died of illness.
In modern Chinese history, Li Shanlan attracted attention with his outstanding mathematical research. Shanlan had profound attainments in mathematics. "His sophistication is said to be unmatched by Westerners and is rare in modern times." The "Zegu Xi Zhai Arithmetic" he edited and published included 13 kinds of mathematical works. The mathematics topics studied by Li Shanlan in his early days were mainly traditional mathematics in my country since the Ming and Qing Dynasties. What is more prominent is his independent research on "Awl Technique". Based on the extreme method of stacking in traditional Chinese mathematics, he invented the apical cone technique, created various power series expansions of trigonometric and logarithmic functions, and the prototypes of several important integral formulas. Li Shanlan was creating " He had not yet come into contact with calculus at the time of "The Art of the Cone", but he actually had the ideas of analytic geometry and calculus, "and he is famous all over the world with just one end." It can be seen that even without calculus introduced from the West, Chinese mathematics will reach calculus through its own special way and unique way of thinking, thereby completing the transformation from elementary mathematics to advanced mathematics.