A Dream of Red Mansions is one of China's four classical literary masterpieces, and it is also famous abroad. According to the redologists, the author of the first eighty chapters of this masterpiece is Cao Xueqin, and the author of the last forty chapters is Gao E. Is this right? Mathematicians have judged this in their own way.

Judging the author of a literary work by mathematical methods has long been a precedent in foreign countries. For example, whether The Silent Don was written by sholokhov, a writer of the former Soviet Union, has caused great controversy. Finally, the statistical methods in mathematical linguistics help and establish sholokhov's position as an author.

We know that everyone's writing style is different, and the ancients are no exception. Some people may prefer to use "Zhi" and "Hu", while others may prefer to use "Zhe" and "Ye". According to the frequency of common words in the text, we can see the differences in styles, so it is self-evident who is the author.

According to this truth, Li Xianping, a China scholar, used the frequency of 47 function words in each episode of A Dream of Red Mansions to explore the closeness of the book's style by calculating the distance and other statistical methods. It turns out that the statement of the red scientist is correct. For the first time, the statement of Redology scholars has been proved and supplemented by mathematical methods.

This achievement was published in the third issue of Social Science Edition 1987 of Journal of Fudan University with the title of A Dream of Red Mansions. It is the most successful and sensational work in the history of China literature to study literature by mathematical methods.