Earlier, both Girolamo CARDANO in his Ars Magna (1580) and Hui YANG (of China, c.1238 - 1298) had used the same method of calculating determinants that Seki later used to find the root of pluralistic simultaneous linear equations with two unknown coefficients; Yang's findings were recorded in "Xiangjie Jiuzhang Suanfa" (a mathematical treatise in which Yang acknowledged that his method of finding square roots and cubic roots had been invented by another mathematician).
先立って、楊輝（中国、1238年?～1298年）は『詳解九章算術』で、ジェロラモ・カルダーノはArsMagna（1580）の中で数字係数の二元連立一次方程式の解を行列式と同様の計算式であたえている。