China has a great independent mathematical tradition to look back upon, with its own focus areas, methods and means of expression, and the memory of this heritage plays such an important part in modern China's cultural self-image that discoveries in the realm of mathematical history have repeatedly found their way into the daily press (see for instance the People's Daily of March 25, 1994, on the discovery of the text of Zhangjiashan, by which parts of the mathematical classic Jiu zhang suanshu could be dated back to the 2nd century BCE).

The absence of grammatical ties in the Chinese…