What makes mathematical texts different from other genres? One important factor appears to be formulaicity, one possible definition for which is the frequent and verbatim repetition of certain stock phrases, such as “without loss of generality”, “thus we can see easily”, and so on. Does pre-modern Chinese mathematics — like modern mathematics — contain such often repeated sequences? To answer this question, Florian Keßler and two of our Master student assistants, Diane Donner and Li Shuyi, have applied the formulib suite of tools, developed by Richard Forsyth, to a corpus of pre-modern Chinese mathematical texts. Our results, presented as a poster at the Jahrestagung des Verbandes Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum (DHd), held 23-27 February in Vienna, show that Chinese mathematical texts are similarly pervaded by formulaic sequences. Reflecting their algorithmic character, many of these consist of phrases specifying the execution of an arithmetic operation, such as “multiply it by”. While such sequences are highly frequent in some texts, our study also shows that true “universals”, i.e. phrases that are ubiquitous in the entire corpus, are very rare. A longer abstract can be found in the Book of Abstracts and the Poster here.
sin-aps goes to DHd (23-27 February, 2026)
