In ancient China, digital mysticism similar to the Pythagorean school was also popular, such as the Book of Changes. The Book of Changes is not so developed and simple in terms of the characteristics of numbers, but it has made great efforts in explaining and deducing the meaning of numbers. In other words, the difference between numerology in ancient China and numerology in ancient Greece is that the former focuses on image interpretation, while the latter focuses on numerology.
China's mysticism of numbers later developed into a cosmology with more methodological significance, which drifted away from the metaphysical wonder of arithmetic and parted ways. China's mathematics (arithmetic) has no ontological function, and China's cosmology will not be refreshed because of the progress of mathematical theory.
On the contrary, Greek mathematics since Pythagoras has been accompanied by cosmology and metaphysics, which either implicitly or explicitly supports the western world outlook.
As a simple technique, China arithmetic has always been very practical. From Zhouyi Shu Jing to Nine Chapters Arithmetic, they are all application-oriented and solve application problems. In order to improve the efficiency of solving some application problems, China creatively developed arithmetic skills.
But in general, little attention is paid to the calculation program and the calculation process itself, and it is rare to prove or even explain whether the algorithm is correct. As a simple technique, China's arithmetic has no high status in China culture.
In ancient times, "number" also ranked at the bottom of the six arts: ceremony, music, shooting, imperial, calligraphy and number, among which ceremony and music shooting were great arts, exclusive to nobles, and the number of books was small arts, which was the ambition of Shu Ren. Later, mathematics was gradually marginalized, so that it was completely ignored. Piano, chess, calligraphy and painting are the four major arts of literati, and arithmetic is not one of them.
In Jin Yong's martial arts novels, there is only one person named Ying Gu, who is good at arithmetic and called "God Operator", but his martial arts is not very strong.