Wang Zhenyi
BIOGRAPHY
Wang Zhenyi was a famous female scientist from the Qing dynasty. She breached the feudal customs of the time which hindered woMen's rights and hardly worked to educate herself in subjects such as astronomy, mathematics, geography, and medicine. Moreover, she was a very strong and intelligent woman well known for her contributions in astronomy, mathematics, and poetry.
Wang Zhenyi was born in 1768, but nobody knows the exactly the date of her birth. Zhenyi’s ancestral home is in Anhui province, but her grandfather's family moved to Jiangning, when she was young. She was very fond of reading when she was a child and also was very smart. Her family was made of her grandfather, called Wang Zhefu, was a former governor of Fengchen county and Xuanhua District, grandmother, called Née Dong and her father, called Wang Xichen.
Zhenyi used to study at home, her grandfather was her first teacher in astronomy, her grandmother was her teacher of poetry, and her father taught her medicine, geography, and mathematics. After her grandfather died, when Zhenyi was fourteen, they stayed in the region of Jilin for five years, which is where she gained extensive knowledge from reading her grandfather’s collection of books as well as learning equestrian skills, archery, and martial arts.
At the age of sixteen, Wang Zhenyi traveled south of the Yangtze river with her father, until she moved back to the capital. After that when she was eighteen, she made friends with female scholars in Jiangning through her poetry and began focusing on her studies in astronomy and mathematics. At age twenty-five she married Zhan Mei from Xuan cheng in Anhui province. After her marriage, she became better known for her poetry and knowledge in mathematics and astronomy that she once taught some male students. Wang Zhenyi died in 1797, at age twenty-nine and had no children.
STARS
One of her contributions was being able to describe her views of celestial phenomena in her article, "Dispute of the Procession of the Equinoxes." She was able to explain and simply prove how equinoxes move and then how to calculate their movement. She wrote many other articles such as "Dispute of Longitude and Stars" as well as "The Explanation of a Lunar Eclipse." She commented on the number of stars, revolving direction of the sun, the moon, and the planets Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Saturn as well as describing the relationship between lunar and solar eclipses. One of her experiments to study a lunar eclipse included placing a round table in a garden pavilion, to be a globe; she hung a crystal lamp on a cord from the ceiling beams, to be the sun. Then on one side of the table she had a round mirror as the moon. She moved these three objects as if they were the sun, earth, and moon according to astronomical principles. Her findings and observations were very accurate and recorded in her article, "The Explanation of a Solar Eclipse."
MATHS
In the realm of mathematics, Zhenyi had mastered trigonometry and knew the Pythagorean theorem. She wrote an article called "The Explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem and Trigonometry," where she described a triangle and the relationship between the shorter leg of a right triangle, the long leg, and the triangle's hypotenuse all correctly.
BY: Ana Perigot and Alejandro Zarazaga