u/Far-Emphasis-1497

China's mathematics was actually very advanced during the Song Dynasty. That was a thousand years before the modern era. Yet, Europe developed calculus, logarithms, etc...

China's mathematics in antiquity rivalled those of Ancient Greece. China was also aware of zero being right next to India. Chinese calculations of π were exceptionally accurate (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Hui%27s_%CF%80_algorithm )

But it sounds like Chinese mathematicians basically fell asleep during the 1600s when Europeans were developing the most important branches of modern maths.

What happened? Why are we not studying Chinese mathematicians with unpronounceable names in the same way that we study Pythagoras and Leibnitz?

Is it just down to racism? We in the West don't want to acknowledge a non-white name so we wait for someone who is white to come up with the same theory and name it after them?

Or was it bigger, that Chinese mathematics was systemically weaker compared with Western maths by late Qing era, and that they had missed most of the major developments in modern maths by that time?