"Amateur" Proofs Blend Religion And Scholarship in Ancient Japan.

MATHEMATICS; GEOMETRY; GEOMETRICAL drawing; SOCIAL history; CULTURE

The article reports that when Japan was isolated from the rest of the world, a unique brand of mathematics flourished in the country's shrines and temples. Amateur mathematicians crafted geometric theorems on elegant wooden tablets called sangaku and offered them to the gods. Remarkably, some of those theorems predate by more than a century the work of Western mathematicians. The sangaku tradition flourished in an era when Japan was closed to outside influences and at peace both internally and with its neighbors.