Comments on: New King Wen sequence book

By: Hilary

Hilary — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:15:06 +0000

Very, very cool indeed. I’ve written about it before.

By: choppi

choppi — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 23:58:18 +0000

Here is a for-free treatment of this very issue
by a Dutch writer:

http://www.fourpillars.net/pdf/kingwen.pdf

Pretty cool, isn’t it ?

By: Zhou

Zhou — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 18:05:54 +0000

Hilary, The basic idea of the book is really quite simple, and Cook really seems to aim at making this accessible to everyone. There is an extensive Glossary in the book, that explains everything. For sure, this book is not a light read: it is the kind of thing people will read and re-read and re-re-read for years to come! It’s no mistake that the Hexagram Sequence went unexplained for 3,000 years! But this book seems so important for the history of Eastern and Western mathematics, it ought to have a big impact beyond Yi Jing studies and Chinese history. What can I say? I’ve read it, and it’s fascinating! I think he should put more preview pages online, since the really great parts are not there yet! The color front cover of the book is there now, but the color back cover is just extraordinary, and not online yet, as far as I can tell! That color figure alone is well worth the price. I hope he makes that available as a large poster, and I’ve emailed him to say so! it would look great on my wall.

By: Hilary

Hilary — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:46:11 +0000

Oh crumbs. Thank you very much for the link. It looks seriously fascinating - but it also looks as though it’d take more than a dusty 19-year-old ‘O’ level maths to make head or tail of the whole thing, doesn’t it?

By: Zhou

Zhou — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:05:26 +0000

Googling, I found this thread, and thought you all might want to know that Dr. Cook’s monograph _Classical Chinese Combinatorics_ is now available online. Their new webstore looks like it’s still in development … but there are sample pages from the book there now, enough to give you an idea of just how important this book is for Yi Jing studies. The Series Editor’s preface (by Prof. James Matisoff, leading American Sino-Tibetanist) is there, along with the table of contents, sample figures, complete author’s Preface, and Acknowledgments. Cook spent 23 years working on this book! If you study The Book of Changes, this is truly essential reading. Get your local library to buy a copy, if the academic book price seems too high: you’ll want to buy your own later! Cook is the leading American Sinologist, and lectured on this subject to Chinese Yi Jing experts in Taiwan last summer, at Academia Sinica and Taiwan National University. This is serious stuff, far beyond what English readers usually get. Somone above mentions one of Cook’s earlier books: actually, that amazing book was not his PhD thesis, but something he wrote before doing his PhD. You can see that info here.

By: Luis Andrade

Luis Andrade — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:17:18 +0000

Thanks for the link! I used to have and lost it. Is in my Del.icio.us now.

By: Hilary

Hilary — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:53:56 +0000

Thanks!

Hm - there is also
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~rscook/html/writing.html
which says ‘online version coming soon’. Sounds promising…

By: Luis Andrade

Luis Andrade — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:46:44 +0000

The Clarity thread is here:
http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/friends/archive/index.php/t-2693.html

By: Luis Andrade

Luis Andrade — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:45:45 +0000

Wow! So Richard Cook finally wrote a book about it. Great! I remember Richard from the old Hexagram-8 forum. The only other people I can think of that remembers him is Chris Lofting and perhaps Midaughter and Chris Gait. He’s a really good guy and with strong opinions. Very knowledgeable. Actually, I think he was a member of Clarity way back at the beginning (I just Google him and a 2001 Clarity thread came up…)

I remember to be amazed by Richard when he said that his doctoral thesis was based on the etymology of a single Chinese character (I can’t remember now which one was it).

The price of the monograph is steep but I’ll consider it.