An attempt to discern patterns in the polymathy in the exact sciences in early imperial China through bibliometrics

Résumé En

The astral sciences in ancient China were conceived as binary, tianwen (lit. ‘heavenly patterns’) and li (lit. ‘sequencing’), that does not map to ‘astronomy’ and ‘astrology’ or any other equivalent; while closely related and placed under the same bibliographic category, the study of celestial and terrestrial mathematics (li vs suan, lit. ‘calculation’) are distinct sub-domains within modern sinology between which cross-overs are rare; scholars such as Howard Goodman and Christopher Cullen have in recent decades revealed the extent to which our historical actors were polymaths rather than specialists; and the recent work of Zhu Yiwen has shown how that polymathy frequently combines such constellations of intellectual pursuits as mathematics, ritual and classical commentary. It has long been my contention that to move past the stage of defining and deconstructing ‘science’, or arguing about the contents of a given actor’s category, we should start over with a statistical analysis of the entire network of actors categories and the density of relations between them to situate people and practices in context. To this end, I will present the results of a tentative attempt to do so using bibliography to detect patterns in fields that, in the aggregate, went along with the mathematical sciences in individual authors’ written output.