Yang Hui

Yang Hui (simplified Chinese: 杨辉; traditional Chinese: 楊輝; pinyin: Yáng Huī; ca. 1238–1298), courtesy name Qianguang (謙光), was a Chinese mathematician and writer. He lived during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. He was from Qiantang, which is now Hangzhou in Zhejiang.

Yang Hui made important contributions to mathematics. He worked with magic squares, magic circles, and the binomial theorem. He is most famous for creating what we now call Yang Hui's triangle. This triangle is the same as Pascal's triangle. It was discovered earlier by another mathematician named Jia Xian (Jia Xian).

Yang Hui lived at the same time as another famous Chinese mathematician, Qin Jiushao (Qin Jiushao). Together, they helped improve math knowledge in China during an interesting time in history.

Written work

Yang Hui wrote important books about mathematics. In a book from 1261 AD, he showed the earliest picture of Pascal’s triangle. This pattern helps solve math problems. He learned this from an earlier mathematician named Jia Xian.

Around 1275 AD, Yang wrote two more books. In these, he described special number patterns called magic circles and magic squares. He also worked on geometry and proved ideas similar to those of the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid. Yang used decimal numbers in his calculations, which made his math more precise.

The Yang-Hui Award

The Yang-Hui Award is given to mathematicians and scientists who have done important work in their fields. It has been awarded to many researchers for their studies in special math theories and modeling diseases.