Transmission of probability theory into China at the end of the nineteenth century

Abstract

In spite of the occurrence of many uncertain events in human experience in different civilizations since antiquity, be it in the East or the West, a quantitative approach to probability was not developed until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe. This peculiar “miss” is particularly notable in the history of Chinese mathematics, even though knowledge and skill in numerical calculation had long been well developed in ancient and medieval China.