On Su Hui’s 璇璣圖, Mathematics, and the Kinds of Intelligence We Keep Missing
An Accidental Encounter
I did not seek a mathematical object, nor a forgotten feminist icon.
I stumbled upon an image on the internet — a square block of Chinese characters, densely packed, colour-coded, visually austere. It did not immediately read like a poem. It looked closer to a schematic, or perhaps a data structure waiting to be queried.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
The visual grammar was wrong for poetry. Poetry announces itself through whitespace, through the breath between lines, through typographic choices that signal lyric intention. This looked like something else entirely: a heat map, a configuration file, a lattice diagram from condensed matter physics.
Only later did I learn what it was: 《璇璣圖》 (Xuanji Tu), traditionally attributed to 蘇蕙 (Su Hui), created sometime around 379 CE during the Former Qin dynasty, in what is now Shaanxi Province.
The temporal dissonance was the first shock.
The second was authorship.
The third was realising that “poem” was an inadequate category.
This was not merely an early literary work by a woman — a rarity in itself — but…