Alexander Wylie (missionary)

Alexander Wylie ( born April 6, 1815 in London, † February 6, 1887 in Hampstead ) was a British missionary and historian of mathematics.

Wylie taught himself Latin and Chinese even when he went for a carpenter in teaching. He learned the language so well that in 1847 the London Missionary Society sent him to Shanghai to oversee their local publisher. There he learned other languages ​​and began to be interested in Chinese history of mathematics. At the same time he spread the use of Chinese over a million copies of the New Testament on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society, whose official agent he was from 1863. In 1877 he went back to London.

He has published essays in 1852 in North China Herald of Chinese mathematics ( Jottings in the history of chinese mathematics ). They were also known in Germany and KL Biernatzki and Ludwig Matthiessen published about it in Crelle Journal (Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics ). In the essays is the first time the Chinese origin of the later Chinese Remainder Theorem reports mentioned method and the Chinese origin of the Horner scheme (introduced in the West by William George Horner 1819). The essays by Wylie ( and an essay by Édouard Biot in the Journal Asiatique in 1839 ) were the only source for Chinese mathematics at the Moritz Cantor was based in his extensive history of mathematics.

He also translated mathematics, mechanics and astronomy books into Chinese, where he worked with the mathematician Li Shanlan ( which is considered superior Chinese mathematician of the 19th century ). The Gospels of Matthew and Mark, he translated into Chinese.

In 1858 he accompanied Lord Elgin on a gunboat of the Royal Navy up the Yangtze to Nanjing, where he was part of a delegation that negotiated with the Taiping rebels. In 1868 he accompanied the missionary John Griffith ( 1831-1912 ) of the London Bible Society, who translated the Bible into Chinese, Sichuan.

His extensive Chinese book collection (20,000 volumes), he sold in 1882 to the University of Oxford, where she is now in the Bodleian Library (Alexander Wylie Collection).

Writings

  • Memorials of Protestant Missionaries. 1867
  • Notes on Chinese Literature. Shanghai, 1867
  • Jottings on the Science of Chinese Mathematics. Shangae Almanac 1853 ( first in 1852 in North China Herald)
  • Chinese Researches. Shanghai 1897
Horner's method James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin Joseph Louis François Bertrand Disquisitiones Arithmeticae Integrated Authority File
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