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Reviewer biography Current Reviews Review Articles Book Reviews Archive Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry by Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman; with a Foreward by Freeman Dyson
Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2008
392 pp., illus., 16 col. Trade, $35.00
ISBN 978-0-691-12745-3.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
This certainly is a math book. Despite some plates of the painted wooden boards— sangaku —that contain geometrical problems, some related prints of Japanese mathematicians at work and photographs of notable temples, it’s not an art book. There are excerpts from the travel diary of nineteenth-century mathematician Yamaguchi Kanzan, who traipsed around Japan to view sangaku . The book is a collection of nearly 200 geometry problems, with diagrams and solutions, taken from sangaku that co-author Fukagawa Hidetoshi studied on similar travels.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Japan’s shogunate consciously decided to keep the islands of their nation free from foreign influence. While they were not completely successful, their isolation from foreign sciences forced Japanese mathematicians to devise many geometric methods themselves. From the book’s title, one might expect the geometry they developed to be applied in the construction of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. If that was the case, it’s a bit disappointing to find that it isn’t explored in this book. Temples were notable sites of learning, where the learned in the region and in transit would meet, and the long wooden | |
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