Description

In 1690, Emperor Kangxi summoned two French missionaries, Zhang Cheng (Jean Francois Gerbillon, 1654–1707) and Bai Jin (Joachim Bouvet, 1656–1730), to Beijing to teach him mathematics. The missionaries initially considered using for this purpose the early 17th-century partial translation by Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) of Euclid’s great work on geometry, Elements, but they found it too complicated. So they decided to translate instead Elements de geometrie by French Jesuit Ignace Gaston Pardies (1636–73), which drew on Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius. They ...