Fukagawa Hidetoshi is a retired high-school teacher in Japan, and one of the world’s experts on sangaku. He is the coauthor of Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry (Princeton University Press, 2008), which traces this unique brand of homegrown traditional Japanese mathematics, which flourished during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when Japan was totally isolated from the West and uninfluenced by developments in Western mathematics.
People from all walks of life — samurai, farmers, and merchants — inscribed a wide variety of geometry problems on wooden sangaku tablets and hung them in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines throughout Japan. Sacred Mathematics is the first book published in the West to fully examine this tantalizing — and incredibly beautiful — mathematical tradition.