Cheng Dawei

Its popularity must have continued to modern times as can be seen from a remark by a contemporary historian of Chinese mathematics: "Nowadays, various editions of the book can still be found in China and old people still recite the versified formulas and talk about the difficult problems in it.

According to Jean Claude Martzloff, historian of Chinese mathematics, "... unlike the authors of the venerable classic, Cheng Dawei was not afraid of superfluity or verbosity.

His book is an encyclopaedic hotch-potch of ideas which contains everything from A to Z relating to the Chinese mystique of numbers (magic squares, ... generation of the eight trigrams, musical tubes), how computation should be taught and studied, the meaning of technical arithmetical terms, computation on the abacus with its tables which must be learnt by heart, the history of Chinese mathematics, mathematical recreations and mathematical curiosities of all types.

In the Huangshan City in southern Anhui province in, there is a museum for abacuses named after Cheng Dawei.

These abacuses are made of gold, silver, ivory, jade, stone, hard wood respectively with different shapes.