Brilliant Record Of Chinese Family. Three members of the family of a Chinese fruiterer Mr J Hoe passed this year's matriculation examination entitling them to entrance to the University. One child, Jack Hoe, attended Wanganui College. His sisters attended Wanganui Girls' College and a younger member of the family was dux of Queen's Park School, Wanganui.

Jack Hoe, Verbena R Hoe and Patricia Hoe, whose matriculation passes were announced on Saturday are all members of the same Chinese family of Wanganui. The boy will go to the Wanganui Collegiate School, and the girls go to Wanganui Girls' College. Another member of the same family Gan Hoe. is starting off well for she is dux of the Queen's Primary School.

Jack William Hoe, a 17 year old Chinese pupil of Wanganui Collegiate School who has won a university bursary this year, is one of three members of the same family who gained matriculation last year. The other two were his sisters Ruby and Patricia. Their parents are Mr and Mrs J Hoe, Swiss Avenue. Jack Hoe was 147th in the list of 209 bursary awards.

Jock went to primary and intermediate school in Wanganui, and won a feepaying scholarship to Wanganui Collegiate. During his childhood he helped in the shop (washing dirt off potatoes, displaying fruit outside the door, sweeping the footpath, etc.). His father had bought a piano for ten pounds and Jock taught himself to play it, later having piano lessons because he showed such interest and promise.

[Gilligan] believed in good sportsmanship, modesty, tolerance, and seeing the other man's point of view, and he was himself an exemplar of these qualities. He would go to endless trouble to help anybody. To watch him taking a game was a liberal education in the art of coaching. A devotee of using one's feet to play slow bowling and of forward play.

He was encouraged by scholarships (to Wanganui Collegiate School and to Otago University) but disempowered by racism, in forms both systemic and personal.

I managed to switch to a third year of Pure and Applied Mathematics [at Victoria University of Wellington]. I have a fond memory of Professor Jim Campbell dressed in his black/grey/green academic gown in full flight across the front of the lecture hall, surrounded by a cloud of chalk dust, talking quickly, writing rapidly and illegibly with his right hand, and erasing his notes with his left hand. He was an inspiration, and a real character.

I didn't get a reply but Mr Gilligan got a reply to say: "We have had an application from Mr Jock Hoe for entry to Cambridge to do mathematics. Why does he want to do mathematics and why does he want to come to Cambridge? Yours sincerely, Senior Tutor, Corpus Christi College." Mr Gilligan called me in and told me he'd had this letter, showed the letter and said - This is my reply: "Dear Senior Tutor, I do not understand why Mr Hoe wants to come to Cambridge, but I did understand that Cambridge was able to give an education of some kind, Yours sincerely F W Gilligan, MA (Oxford)." I got a reply by return post offering me a place at Corpus Christi College.

... he added Malay to his portfolio of languages (English, French, Latin, German, Cantonese, Mandarin, plus some Russian and Greek).

Jock was appointed to teach the newly-offered courses in Statistics, but it is a measure of his breadth of scholarship that in 1963 when he was also required to teach rigid body dynamics in third-year applied mathematics, he did it so well that his students (well, this writer at least) thought he must be a specialist applied mathematician.

While teaching in Wellington he spent study leaves and many southern summers in Paris winters, studying under the supervision of Jacques Gernet, founder and director of the Unit for Teaching and Research on Languages and Civilisations of East Asia (Université de Paris VII) and, later, Professor at the Collège de France.

... the first valuable investigations of the mathematical work of Zhu Shijie in European languages ... John Hoe, who teaches in the Mathematics Department of the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, has written a profound study of the 'Ssu-yuan yü-chien'. He defended it as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Paris VII.

In the first chapter, the author elucidates the bases of Chinese algebra: the numeral notation, the operations on the counting-board, the 't'ien-yuan' method and the Pythagorean theorem. None of this is peculiar to Zhu Shijie, but it is necessary to explain this system to those who are not acquainted with the character of Chinese mathematics.

Chapter 2 is the most important part of the work. Indeed, the non-sinologist historian of mathematics, who until now had at his disposal only the explanation of Van Hée, could hardly understand Zhu's algorithm. In this chapter, the author explains the four introductory problems in which Zhu elucidates the method for solving non-linear simultaneous equations with one, two, three or four unknowns. The explanation is at first sight long-winded, but the detail is indispensable to full comprehension. The special notation used in Zhu Shijie's work is evidence of his great mathematical skill but it is also largely responsible for the stagnation of Chinese mathematics. It limited its own possibilities, and could never develop into a general mathematical notation.

Chapter 3 is devoted to the mathematical content of the work: numerical equations of higher degree, areas and volumes, series and interpolation, simultaneous linear equations, and a kind of proto-trigonometry - the usual topics of Sung and Yuan mathematical handbooks.

From the mathematical point of view, this is an extremely good study of Zhu Shijie's work. The explanation of the Chinese text is Cartesian in its clarity and the material is made accessible to non-sinologists.

The author excels at describing the procedures employed by Chinese algebraists; he shows the impressive results they have achieved with their application, but he also highlights the handicap they presented at some stage of development. He has succeeded in rendering the Chinese text in an original way ...

Jock's translation process reveals how Chinese mathematical thought proceeded. He observed that the Chinese language used certain words much like algebraic variables and operators, and how that technical use of everyday language allowed mathematics to meld seamlessly into the surrounding prose. He devised a semi-symbolic English to convey this (e.g. "HYP MULT BASE" for "multiply the length of the hypotenuse by the length of the base"), contrasting both historiography and mathematics against the translations and studies of Mesopotamian and Greek mathematics then available. Jock hence demonstrated that Chinese script inherently provided a symbolic handling for algebraic quantities and actions, and that this ability of the Chinese language helps to explain why a separate symbolic algebra did not develop in China: it was not needed.

... was very helpful to Jock, getting him an unasked-for promotion to Reader (which Jock found out about on his return from Paris), and providing him with a sanctuary in the mathematics department while knowing that Jock's main interests by now were in languages and cultures; teaching English speakers about Chinese thought and culture and teaching Chinese speakers about English and Western culture. In the late 1970s Jock reduced his mathematics lecturing load to two-thirds, freeing up time to teach Mandarin in the Chinese Department at Victoria University. During that time he was a leading member of the New Zealand China Society, promoting a better understanding of China. In 1978 he led a trip of New Zealand observers (including Mary Vere-Jones) to China.

... Jock Hoe, our much beloved and respected Chinese statistician scholar. The trip played an important part in Jock's subsequent career, I suspect, for he ended up in a Chinese hospital, experiencing an effective combination of western and Chinese treatments which may well have disposed him subsequently to join the English Language Institute in Shanghai - not a common career move but he is now widely respected in both hemispheres as an expert on early Chinese mathematical texts.

The New Zealand China Friendship Society was formed at a meeting in Auckland on 27 February 1952. ... The Society was being actively promoted from China. ... There were few Chinese formerly involved in the Society because it was difficult, in particular for those whose own immigration status was unclear, to be seen to be supportive of Communist China. The fear of intervention from a few Chinese-New Zealanders who had citizenship such as Jim Wong, Nancy Goddard (née Kwok) and later Jock Hoe rose to prominence but for many their involvement was either veiled in secrecy or through a companion front organisation. ... Although ... Graeme Clarke said that in 1980 Jock Hoe had made pro-cultural revolution comments, Hoe had long drifted away from the Society by this stage and had lived outside of New Zealand for much of the intervening period. ... Jock Hoe, who taught history in Shanghai, had been involved with the Society for many years ... When Graeme Clarke visited Hoe [in Shanghai] in 1980, Hoe was still defending the Cultural Revolution.

Mathematics in ancient China was needed for practical purposes such as the calculation of the calendar, the surveying of fields, the building and construction of city walls, the planning of corvée duty, the gathering of taxes and so on. Government officials needed to be trained in the elements of mathematics and, at certain periods, mathematics was included as a formal part of the curriculum for the state civil service examinations. A small number of text-books for teaching mathematics is extant, the earliest dating from the Han dynasty (206BC - 220AD).