ABSTRACT
In the standard celebratory account of Wu Wen-Tsun’s historical research after 1975, traditional Chinese mathematics is portrayed as a given. Wu simply made correct, penetrating observations about it, and applied them back to his own mathematical research. In the last chapter, however, we have witnessed Wu’s increasing efforts to link his research with ideologically legitimate causes. Such ideological concerns became part of his philosophy of mathematics, which he started to articulate by the mid-1970s, and this in turn informed to a large extent his construction of Chinese traditional mathematics.
