In "The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art," which was written in the early ancient period (before the first century A.D.), four arithmetic operations for negative numbers were developed, and the book generally succeeded in introducing pluralistic simultaneous linear equations based on the results of those operations; Gaussian elimination was also introduced.
早くも古代（後1世紀以前）に成立した『九章算術』では、負の数の四則演算を扱い、その成果に基づいて多元連立一次方程式を一般的に扱うことに成功し、ガウスの消去法を導入している。