Sun Tzu (mathematician) facts for kids
- This article is about the mathematician Sun Tzu. For the military strategist of the same name, see Sun Tzu.
Sun Tzu (also spelled Sun Zi) was a smart Chinese mathematician who lived around the third century CE. He was very interested in numbers and how they could help understand the world.
Contents
Who Was Sun Tzu?
Sun Tzu was a brilliant thinker from ancient China. He spent his time studying the stars and planets, which is called astronomy. He wanted to create a better calendar to track time and seasons accurately. To do this, he explored special math problems called Diophantine equations. These are equations where you only look for whole number answers.
His Famous Book
Sun Tzu is most famous for writing a book called Sun Tzu Suan Ching. In English, this means "Sun Tzu's Calculation Classic." This book is very important because it contains a famous math idea known as the Chinese remainder theorem.
What is the Chinese Remainder Theorem?
The Chinese Remainder Theorem is a way to solve a certain type of puzzle. Imagine you have a number, but you don't know what it is. You only know what's left over when you divide it by different small numbers.
For example, if you have a pile of candies:
- When you divide them into groups of 3, there's 1 candy left.
- When you divide them into groups of 5, there are 3 candies left.
- When you divide them into groups of 7, there are 2 candies left.
The Chinese Remainder Theorem helps you figure out the smallest number of candies you could have. Sun Tzu's book showed how to solve these kinds of problems, which was a big deal for mathematicians back then!
Images for kids
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Sunzi's method for division
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Sunzi's method for finding a square root
See also
In Spanish: Sun Zi Suanjing para niños
