Chou Kung (12th century BC)

Chou Kung or the duke of Chou was the brother of Wu Wang the founder of the Chou Dynasty. He was a political figure who solidified the power of the Zhou dynasty. On the death of his brother, he resisted the temptation to size the throne and chose instead to serve as counselor to his nephew.

Chou Kung put down the final Shang rebellion and established a governmental organization that lasted for nearly 800 years.

He is remembered for his name in the Chou li (Rites of Chou) one of the oldest of the ancient Chinese scientific treatises, in which he supposedly takes part in a dialog with someone called Shang Kao.

Their conversation concerns the properties of the right-angled triangle, the gnomon, the circle and the square, as well as measuring heights and distances.

The work is important in providing hard evidence for the state of early Chinese mathematics. The most significant feature of the work is a demonstration of the proof of Pythagoras’s theorem for triangles with sides of 3, 4 and 5 units.

The proof consisted of diagrammatically stacking triangles one on top of the other.
Chou Kung (12th century BC)