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I'm not seeing that. I see a degree 10 equation, which oddly has no rational roots (though my guess is this is what is meant by "solving"). I've never seen any

by wbhart 8y ago

I'm not seeing that. I see a degree 10 equation, which oddly has no rational roots (though my guess is this is what is meant by "solving"). I've never seen any mention of the Chinese solving degree 14 equations in any books on the history of mathematics. I'm very dubious of the claim, in any form, other than finding rational roots of polynomials (which the Greeks were doing more than a millennium earlier). Edit: no they were finding rational approximations to roots, which is actually pretty clever.

fspeech 8y ago
"Edit: no they were finding rational approximations to roots, which is actually pretty clever." Right they provided a general numerical method that can solve univariate polynomials of any degree. See https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%A7%A6%E4%B9%9D%E9%9F%B6%E7%AE%97%E6%B3%95 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%A7%A6%E4%B9%9D%E9%9F%B6%E7... "南宋数学家秦九韶将贾宪的增乘开方术推广，以求解任意高次方程的实数根的数值解"