List .. perhaps this is old news.. but it was new to me so I just thought I'd pass it along. An excerpt from an artical on Equal Temperament....by John H. Lienhard "The startling thing about all this is that the modern scheme of equal temperament isn't a Western one at all. Mersenne's book came out in 1636. But a very different author published the same theory a half-century earlier. It was published in 1584 by Chu Tsai-Yu, a prince of the Ming dynasty. The first Western reference to Chu was made by a European mathematician in 620. That was 16 years before Mersenne; and Mersenne didn't mention Chu at all."
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC