Shen Kuo
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Shen Kuo or Shen Kua (}; }) (1031 - 1095) was a Chinese scientist, polymath, general, diplomat, and financial officer who was the inventor of compasses for navigation.
In the book Meng Xi Bi Tan (梦溪笔谈; Dream Pool Essays) (1088) he wrote about mineralogy, erosion, sedimentation and uplift, mathematics, astronomy, and metereology. The literal translation of Meng Xi Bi Tan (or Meng ch'i pi t'an) is Brush talks from Dream Brook. The name derives from his property on the outskirts of Jiangsu (Zhenjiang), a place of great beauty which he named "Dream Brook" and where he lived in isolation for the last seven years of his life. In his biography in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990) he is quoted:
- Because I had only my writing brush and ink slab to converse with, I call it Brush Talks.
He formulated an hypothesis for the process of land formation; based on his observation of fossil shells in a geological stratum in a mountain hundreds of miles from the ocean, he inferred that the land was formed by erosion of the mountains and by deposition of silt. Shen Kuo was not only a geologist; his memoirs list "regularities underlying phenomena" in magnetism, astronomy, and engineering.
He also wrote about Yi Xing (672-717), a Buddhist monk and his calculation of possible positions on a go board, but without a sign for zero he had difficulties expressing the number.
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