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Assistant Professor
Departments of History and Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin
Curriculum Vitae (HTML with hyperlinks) (PDF)
email: rhart@rhart.orgBroadly speaking, the overall focus of my research is world history and globalization, addressing questions relating to the global circulation of scientific knowledge. My research and teaching interests include Chinese history, the world history of science, globalization, and critical theory.
Imagining Civilizations: China, the West, and Their First Encounter (Johns Hopkins University Press, in press, forthcoming in 2012, 273 pp.), reexamines the advent of the Jesuits in seventeenth-century China, which has often been celebrated as the “first encounter” of two great civilizations, “China” and “the West.” Recent studies have argued that recognition of the superiority of Western science led a select group of concerned Chinese officials to convert to Catholicism. These studies have focused on the Jesuits—taking the Jesuits as the historical protagonists—and have been based primarily on the prolific writings of the Jesuits themselves. Imagining Civilizations focuses on China, using Chinese primary sources, and the historical protagonists are the Chinese, who were in a position of considerable power over their Jesuit collaborators. The approach is microhistorical: instead of viewing this as a “first encounter,” this study critically analyzes how the protagonists imagined “the West” to further their purposes. The result is a perspective startlingly different from that found in previous studies based on Jesuit sources: while the Jesuits claimed them as converts, these Chinese officials represented the Jesuits as “men from afar” who had traveled to China to serve the emperor. The writings of the Jesuits, they argued, preserved lost doctrines from ancient China. Adopting these doctrines would help the dynasty return to the perfected moral order of ancient China, which they imagined existed in “the West,” where for over a thousand years there had been no wars, rebellions, or changes in dynasty. The extravagant claims of the superiority, newness, and practical efficacy of Western Learning (Xi xue 西學) made by these Chinese officials, who had little knowledge of Chinese sciences, were in historical context bids for patronage through memorials in which they fashioned themselves as statesmen with novel solutions to late-Ming crises.
The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 304 pp.) contributes to world history by demonstrating the global circulation of mathematical practices prior to the scientific revolution. I show that the essentials of the methods used today in modern linear algebra were not first discovered by Leibniz or by Gauss: the essentials of these methods—augmented matrices, elimination, and determinantal-style calculations—were known by the first century CE in China. This is the first book-length study in any language of linear algebra in imperial China; it is also the first book-length study of linear algebra as it existed before 1678, the date Leibniz began his studies. The central thesis of the book is that it was the visualization of problems in two dimensions as arrays of numbers on a counting board and the “cross multiplication” of entries that led to general solutions of systems of linear equations not found in early Greek mathematics. I began this research under a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and completed it under an ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. More information on this research is available on the digital history website below. I have recently completed additional research demonstrating that linear algebra spread from early imperial China to medieval Europe by the thirteenth century.
Reviews of Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra:
“A beautifully written scholarly book in an area where books are scarce. Hart’s scholarship is impeccable and his precision is a delight. The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra will be essential reading for those interested in the history of Chinese mathematics.”—John N. Crossley, Emeritus Professor, Monash University
“A pivotal work in the history of non-Western mathematics that will revolutionize people’s understanding of the origins of techniques previously viewed as Western inventions.”—Choice
“The Diffusion of Linear Algebra from China to Medieval Europe” (14 typeset pages, submitted for review).
“Universals of Yesteryear: Hegel’s Modernity in an Age of Globalization,” in Global History: Interactions Between the Universal and the Local, edited by A. G. Hopkins (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 66–97.
“Quantifying Ritual: Political Cosmology, Courtly Music, and Precision Mathematics in Seventeenth-Century China,” to be included in Hart, Imagining Civilizations: China, the West, and Their First Encounter.
“The Great Explanandum,” essay review of The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600, by Alfred W. Crosby, American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (April 2000): 486–493.
“Translating the Untranslatable: From Copula to Incommensurable Worlds,” in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, edited by Lydia H. Liu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 45–73. Earlier version published as “Translating Worlds: Incommensurability and Problems of Existence in Seventeenth-Century China,”Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7, no. 1 (spring 1999): 95–128. Reprinted in Han yi Ying lilun duben 汉译英理论读本 [Theoretical Reader on Translating Chinese into English], ed. Yu Shiyi 余石屹 (Beijing: Science Publications [Kexue chubanshe 科学出版社], 2008).
“Beyond Science and Civilization: A Post-Needham Critique,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 16 (1999): 88–114. Earlier version published as “On the Problem of Chinese Science,” in The Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), 189–201. Translated into Chinese by Wan Yiji 万一己, in Zhongguo kexue yu kexue geming 中国科学与科学革命 [Chinese Science and Scientific Revolution], ed. Liu Dun 刘钝 and Wang Yangzong 王扬宗 (Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe 辽宁教育出版社, 2002).
“Dui xiandaixing de shuangchong fouding queren: Habeimasi de chaoyan shili lilun de zixiang maodun” 對現代性的雙重否定確認：哈貝馬斯的超驗勢力理論的自相矛盾（上，下） [Modernity by Contradiction: Habermas’s Paradoxical Theory of Transcendental Power, Parts I and II, in Chinese]. Xueren 學人 [The scholars] 6 (1994): 425–43 and 8 (1995): 385–402.
Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra Digital History Website (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rhart/algebra/): In order to help my technical research on the early history of Chinese linear algebra reach a broader audience, I am developing a digital history website to demonstrate the solutions to linear algebra problems in imperial China. (Note: this website is currently in its preliminary stages of development.)
Before coming to the University of Texas, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, in the Fishbein Center for the History of Science. Previously I was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Before that I was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Stanford University. I have been a postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies, Harvard University and the Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley, and a visiting fellow in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of History, UCLA. I earned my M.S. from Stanford in mathematics and B.S. from MIT in mathematics. I have spent a total of six years teaching, studying and researching in China.
I have presented over fifty lectures on my work at various scholarly forums. In addition, I have also organized or co-organized several academic conferences and seminar series, including the following:
“Disunity of Chinese Science” (University of Chicago, May 10–12, 2002);
“Rethinking Science and Civilization: The Ideologies, Disciplines, and Rhetorics of World History” (Stanford, May 21–23, 1999);
“Critical Studies: Writing Science” (Stanford University, 1998–1999);
“Intersecting Areas and Disciplines: Cultural Studies of Chinese Science, Technology and Medicine” (UC Berkeley, February 27–28, 1998).
“East Asia to 1800” (fall 2010, offered yearly).
“History of Chinese Medicine” (fall 2010, previously offered spring 2008).
“Traditional China” (spring 2011, offered yearly).
“History of World Science to 1650” (spring 2011, offered yearly).
“Cultural History of Late Imperial China” (fall 2009, previously offered in 2008).
“Chinese Science, Technology, and Medicine” (fall 2006, previously offered at Stanford).
“Global Interconnections” (MDV 392M and MDV 685L, a team-taught course organized by Prof. Geraldine Heng, spring 2004)
“Imagined Unities: Nations, Civilizations, Modernities” (spring 2003; previously offered at Univ. of Chicago).
“Critical Studies: The Disunity of Language, Science, and Culture” (spring 2002; previously offered at Stanford and Univ. of Chicago).
“Cultural History of Ming China” (spring 2002).
“An Introduction to Sources in the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine” (Univ. of Chicago, winter 2001).
“The Scientific Revolution: History and Counter-History” (Univ. of Chicago, spring 2001).
“Chinese Medicine: Interdisciplinary Studies” (Stanford, spring 1999).
“Cultural History of Chinese Science, Technology, and Medicine” (Stanford, winter 1998).