Fujioka Historical Museum

The Fujioka Historical Museum in Gunma honors Seki Takakazu, the mathematician born sometime around 1642 who is often called the Isaac Newton of Japan. Working independently from Western scholars, Seki calculated pi to 16 decimal places around 1681, developed algebraic methods, and identified the sequence of numbers later named for the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, whose own work was published a year after Seki's posthumous 1712 paper. He contributed to wasan, the distinct branch of mathematics practiced in Japan during the Edo period, and his methods remained dominant until Arabic numerals and Western mathematics arrived in the late 19th century.