Seki Takakazu

Seki Takakazu (Seki Kōwa)
Seki Takakazu (Seki Kōwa)
Born	March(?), 1642(?) Edo or Fujioka, Japan
Died	December 5, 1708 (Gregorian calendar) Japan
Residence	Japan
Nationality	Japanese
Fields	Mathematics

Seki Takakazu (関 孝和^?, 1642 – December 5, 1708), also known as Seki Kōwa (関 孝和^?), was a Japanese mathematician in the Edo period.

Seki laid foundations for the subsequent development of Japanese mathematics known as wasan; and he has been described as "Japan's Newton".

He created a new algebraic notation system and, motivated by astronomical computations, did work on infinitesimal calculus and Diophantine equations. A contemporary of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton, Seki's work was independent. His successors later developed a school dominant in Japanese mathematics until the end of the Edo period.

While it is not clear how much of the achievements of wasan are Seki's, since many of them appear only in writings of his pupils, some of the results parallel or anticipate those discovered in Europe. For example, he is credited with the discovery of Bernoulli numbers. The resultant and determinant (the first in 1683, the complete version no later than 1710) are attributed to him. This work was a substantial advance on, for example, the comprehensive introduction of 13th-century Chinese algebra made as late as 1671, by Kazuyuki Sawaguchi.