Monday, March 31, 2008

The Yanghui Triangle

What is that? Well, it's used to find the coefficients of a binomial expansion. Just like Pascal's triangle. Actually, it is the same thing. Yanghui was a Chinese mathematician from the thirteenth century who did work with binomial expansions and created a triangular array to contain them. One interesting thing about the document we have of the ancient Chinese version of the triangle is that it appears to contain an error. Here is a high resolution image where you can try to find it:


An ancient scribe must have been having an off day. Notice also that for some reason, the symbol for "ten" looks a lot like the Arabic numerals version, just turned on its side. There is more history of the triangle, and the answer to where the mistake is, here.

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