• Journal for History of Mathematics
• /
• v.28 no.6
• /
• pp.311-320
• /
• 2015

In 1613 the official-scholar LI Zhi-zao (李之藻) of the Ming Dynasty, in collaboration with the Italian Jesuit Matteo RICCI (利瑪竇), compiled the treatise Tongwen Suanzhi (同文算指). This is the first book which transmitted into China in a systematic and comprehensive way the art of written calculation that had been in common practice in Europe since the sixteenth century. This paper tries to see what pedagogical lessons can be gleaned from the book, in particular on the basic operations in arithmetic and related applications in various types of problems which form the content of modern day mathematics in elementary school education.