Chéng Dàwèi 程大位
Style name Rǔsī 汝思, sobriquet Bīnqú 賓渠. Native of Xiūníng 休寧 (Huīzhōu 徽州 prefecture, southern Ānhuī — the major Huī-merchant region). Born Jiājìng 12 (1533); died Wànlì 34 (1606). CBDB id 65808 gives the dates 1520–1600; the more widely accepted lifedates from the Chéngshì jiāpǔ 程氏家譜 (Chéng Family Genealogy) and the work’s own dated prefaces are 1533–1606, followed here. The CBDB record likely reflects an earlier mistranscription; the genealogy is the authoritative source.
A Huīzhōu merchant-mathematician of the late Míng. According to his own preface to the Suànfǎ tǒngzōng, Chéng Dàwèi worked as a commercial agent (his family’s profession) traveling on business throughout the lower-Yangzi region and the southern provinces, gathering mathematical books and instructional materials as he went; in his later years he settled at the family seat at Bīnqú 賓渠 (his sobriquet) and devoted himself to the compilation of the Suànfǎ tǒngzōng.
His principal works:
(1) The Xīnbiān zhízhǐ suànfǎ tǒngzōng 新編直指算法統宗 (KR3fc027), more commonly Suànfǎ tǒngzōng 算法統宗, in 17 juàn — the great Wàn-lì-period mathematical compendium of 1592, the most influential mathematical work of the late Míng and the foundational textbook of MíngQīng abacus arithmetic.
(2) The Suànfǎ zuǎnyào 算法纂要 in 4 juàn (1598) — an abridgement of the Tǒngzōng for everyday commercial use, also widely circulated.
Chéng Dàwèi’s Suànfǎ tǒngzōng is the principal pre-modern Chinese abacus textbook and the central document of late-imperial Chinese practical-mathematical literature. Its influence — through repeated reprinting (over thirty editions by the early Qīng), through its transmission to Korea and Japan, and through its incorporation into the standard merchant-apprentice curriculum across the Qīng dynasty — is unmatched among MíngQīng mathematical works. The cliché suànpán 算盤 (abacus) form of mid-Míng commercial arithmetic is essentially Chéng Dàwèi’s; the standardized abacus-mnemonics (kǒujué) that he codifies in the Tǒngzōng were the universal training material for commercial computation through the late-imperial period and into the twentieth century.