Euclid versus Liu Hui

This is a Chinese mathematician, working away with his counting board, or abacus.

Now I will open my mouth and words will come out - and I have no idea if they will make sense because to say that my knowledge in this field was partial would be to overstate wildly!

Anyway, Greek mathematics (as represented by Euclid - the type we know) is fundamentally different from Chinese mathematics - the big name here seems to be a chap called Liu Hui, who lived from c. 220-280.

While, for example, Greek maths depends on awarding values alphabetical letters - thus allowing you to play around with them without being hindered by the values. You can handle very complex numbers without referring to the concrete. But the Chinese mathematicians were much more interested in reality rather than representation. So a segment would be described as "the distance from the man to the bottom of the tree", or "the depth of the water". While a point might be "the bottom of a tree"!

Now I just about see what they're on about - but I'm waiting for a pile of blip mathematicians to come on and tell me I got it all totally wrong!

But if this all true you can see why abacuses worked so well for the Chinese. When I used to visit Hong Kong a bit, before '97, I was amused, by the way, that shopkeepers would add up the bill on a calculator, and then turn round and check the sums on the abacus!