When translating foreign mathematics books in the early Qing Dynasty, they were translated into "equivalent formulas" according to the original Latin meaning. It was not until 1859 that China scholar Li changed it to the term "equation" in ancient China.
Equation is an important content in elementary algebra, and its knowledge is widely used in production practice.
There was a study on equations in ancient China: there was a chapter on "Equation" in "Nine Chapters of Arithmetic", which was nearly 2000 years ago. The equations in the book refer to multiple simultaneous linear equations. /kloc-In the 3rd century, Qin pioneered the numerical solution of positive and negative cholesky decomposition, that is, the one-dimensional higher-order equation. In the west, British W.G. Horner only found a similar approximate method in 18 19. /kloc-in the 4th century, Zhu Shijie's research on simultaneous equations of four variables of higher order reached a very high level.
/kloc-in the 6th century, with the appearance of various mathematical symbols, especially after the French mathematician Veda created a systematic symbol to represent unknown quantities and known quantities, the special concept of "unknown quantity equation" appeared. At that time, Latin was called "aequatio" and English was called "Equality". /kloc-Around the 7th century, European algebra was first introduced to China, and was translated into "equation" at that time.
At that time, the influence of ancient China culture was still very strong, and the modern western science and culture failed to spread widely in China in time and had a great influence. Therefore, the disciplines or concepts of "algebra" and "equation" have only been studied and studied by very few people.
/kloc-In the middle of 0/9th century, western modern mathematics was introduced to China again. 1859, Li and English missionaries translated Elementary Algebra by British mathematician Morgan.
Li and Wei attach great importance to the correct translation of mathematical terms. They borrowed or created nearly 400 Chinese translation mathematical terms, many of which are still in use today. The translation of "Equation" borrowed the word "Equation" from ancient China. In this way, the word "equation" has the meaning of "equation with unknown number" for the first time.
For a long time, the thoughts of Hua and Fu have been widely accepted. Until 1934, chinese mathematical society checked the nouns and determined that "equation" and "equation" had the same meaning. Broadly speaking, they refer to unary equations of degree n and equations established by several equations. In a narrow sense, it refers to an unary n-degree equation.
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The origin of the equation name:
The word equation was first seen in China's ancient arithmetic book Nine Chapters Arithmetic. Nine Chapters Arithmetic is the oldest existing China mathematical classic in the early years of the Eastern Han Dynasty. The book collects 246 application problems and solutions to other problems, which are divided into nine chapters, and "equation" is one of them. The so-called "equation" in this chapter refers to linear equations.
In ancient times, it was arranged and solved by calculation. Liu Hui, an ancient mathematician in China, commented on Nine Chapters of Arithmetic and said: "Cheng, the course is also. Two things are two steps, and three things are three steps, all of which are like the number of things and tied for lines, so it is called an equation. " The so-called "image number" here means that if there are several unknowns, several equations must be listed. When the unknown coefficient of a linear equation group is expressed by calculation, it is like a square matrix, so it is called an equation group.