Born: 1768, China
Died: 1797
Country most active: China
Also known as: 王振义
Qing dynasty scientist Wang Zhenyi accomplished much in her short life, excelling particularly in astronomy, mathematics and poetry.
Unusually for a woman in 1700s China, she was educated in the sciences by her intellectual family, with her grandfather teaching her astronomy and father teaching her medicine, geography and mathematics in addition to her grandmother teaching her poetry and her own independent studies of the family’s extensive library and from their travels to different parts of China. She also learned horse-riding skills, archery and martial arts from the wife of a Mongolian general named Aa. She was friends with other female scholars in Jiangning, and taught male students as well.
In her article “Dispute of the Procession of the Equinoxes,” Wang Zhenyi explained and proved in a simple way how celestials bodies move during an equinox, and how to calculate their movement. It was one of many articles she wrote, on topics like the number of stars; revolution directions of the sun, the moon, and the planets Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Saturn and the relationship between lunar and solar eclipses. In addition to studying the work of other astronomers, she conducted her own research as well. In one such experiment, she studied lunar eclipses by hanging a crystal lamp to act as the sun, with a round table representing Earth and a round mirror for the moon. By moving the various objects, she was able to make useful and accurate observations, documented in her article, “The Explanation of a Solar Eclipse.”
In mathematics, Wang Zhenyi’s greatest contribution was producing works with simple explanations of mathematical principles. Having mastered trigonometry, she clearly explainied the Pythagorean theorem in an article on the topic. She admired the work of Mei Wending (1633–1721), studying his book Principles of Calculation and later rewriting it using simpler language, and publishing it under the title, The Musts of Calculation. She simplified multiplication and division, making them easier to learn. She wrote a book, The Simple Principles of Calculation, when she was 24. Of her mathematics studies, she wrote, “There were times that I had to put down my pen and sigh. But I love the subject, I do not give up.”
Her 13 volumes of writing included Ci (poetry) prose, and prefaces and postscripts for other works. Lacking the flowery phrasing considered feminine at the time, her work inspired the back-handed compliment from another scholar that her poetry “had the flavor of a great pen, not of a female poet.” Her poetry encompassed her knowledge of classics and history and experiences from her travels. This included the difficult lives of commoners, particularly women, in poems like “Woman Breeder of Silkworm” and “Clothes Washing,” as well as corruption and the striking contrast between the lives of the rich and poor in pieces like “A Poem of Eight Lines”:
Village is empty of cooking smoke,
Rich families let grains stored decay;
In wormwood strewed pitiful starved bodies,
Greedy officials yet push farm levying.
An advocate for gender equality, Wang Zhenyi wrote in one of her poems:
It’s made to believe,
Women are the same as Men;
Are you not convinced,
Daughters can also be heroic?
She observed”, when talking about learning and sciences, people thought of no women,” commenting on the belief that that “women should only do cooking and sewing, and that they should not be bothered about writing articles for publication, studying history, composing poetry or doing calligraphy” but [men and women] “are all people, who have the same reason for studying.”
Married at 25, she died at age 29, as the result of an unknown illness. Her legacy was preserved by her best friend, Madam Kuai (1763–1827); having given her works and manuscripts to her friend, Madam Kuai passed them on to her nephew, the famed scholar Qian Yiji (1783–1850), who compiled her work into Shusuan Jiancun (Simple Principles of Calculation). Qian Yiji described Wang Zhenyi as the “number one female scholar after Ban Zhao.”
A crater on Venus was named for her in 1994.