Wada Nei

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Wada Yenzō Nei (* 1787; † 1840) was a Japanese mathematician. He was born in Yedo in the province Harima under the name of Kōyama Naoaki. In his early years he served in a buddhist temple in Yedo under the name Zōjōji. When he left the temple he changed his name for unknown reasons to Wada Nei and worked under the patronage of lord Tsuchimikado the calendar maker of the court of Mikado. There he started to take up mathematics and was a student of Kusaka Sei. Kusaka Sei himself was a student of Ajima Chokuyen. Wada Nei extended Ajima Chokuyen's development of an integral calculus within the Enri (円理, "circle principle") context. He worked on the computation of minimum and maximum values (roughly by equating the first derivative to 0) and gave reasoning and insight to the computation method that was given without explanation by Seki Takakazu about 100 years earlier. He was also the first Japanese mathematician to study roulettes.

[edit] See also

• Wasan

[edit] References

• David Eugene Smith, Yoshio Mikami: A History of Japanese Mathematics. Open Court Publishing, Chicago,1914