By Jiri Hudecek

Twentieth-century China has been stuck among a wish to bring up its wealth and gear in response to different complicated international locations, which, through implication, capability copying their associations, practices and values, when at the same time trying to shield China’s independence and traditionally shaped identification. through the years, chinese language philosophers, writers, artists and politicians have all sought to reconcile those objectives and this publication indicates how this look for a chinese language manner penetrated even the main valuable, least contested sector of modernity: science.

is a research of the lifetime of considered one of sleek China’s so much renowned medical figures, the mathematician Wu Wen-Tsun. Negotiating the clash among growth and culture, he came upon a direction that not just ensured his political and private survival, yet which additionally introduced him renown as a mathematician of overseas prestige who claimed that he stood outdoors the dominant western culture of arithmetic. Wu Wen-Tsun’s tale highlights the most important advancements and contradictions in 20th -century China, the importance of which extends a long way past the sector of arithmetic. On one hand lies the allure of radical medical modernity, "mechanisation" in all its kinds, and competitiveness in the foreign clinical neighborhood. at the different is an anxiousness to maintain nationwide traditions and cause them to a part of the modernisation undertaking. additionally, Wu’s highbrow improvement additionally displays the advanced dating among technological know-how and Maoist ideology, simply because his flip to background used to be powered by way of his internalisation of sure elements of Maoist ideology, together with its utilitarian philosophy of science.

This e-book lines how Wu controlled to mix political luck and overseas clinical eminence, a narrative that has wider implications for a brand new century of accelerating chinese language task within the sciences. As such, will probably be of significant curiosity to scholars and students of chinese language heritage, the background of technology and the historical past and philosophy of mathematics.