Zhenyi would not resign himself to stay at home while his life went by playing the role that others forced him to act.
"It is made to believe that women are the same as men.
Are you not convinced that daughters can also be heroic?"
- Wang Zhenyi-
Genius woman? How is that? And better than Da Vinci? Impossible!. But when reading the rest of the story you will understand why prejudices have no place in reality and that forgot one of the most brilliant minds of all time.
Among his intellectual achievements as an astronomer is having demonstrated the movement of the equinoxes and the exact calculation of his movements. His tireless observation of the Solar System made him collect studies on the planets and the luminous star. Among the twelve books he wrote in this field of knowledge are; On the length and the stars, as well as On the explanation of lunar eclipses and On the procession of the equinoxes.
During Wang Zhenyi's childhood - which occurred during the first stage of the Qing Dynasty in China - no woman had the right to education. Their only permitted occupation was to take charge of the home and their husbands. However, the family where he had to grow had a deep inclination for poetry, on the part of his grandmother, mathematics and astronomy, by his grandfather, and medicine, by his father.
The little girl lived her first years surrounded by books about science and art, which fueled her genuine curiosity about the world where her feet rested. It was not easy, but it was not impossible either. Zhenyi would not resign himself to stay at home while his life went by playing the role that others forced him to act. If there were no ways to prepare, you would have to invent them. This was how he autonomously nurtured his mind and spirit with the material he had at his disposal.
He knew the Pythagorean Theorem perfectly and had a perfect understanding of trigonometry and arithmetic. The enormous capacity that she had for these spheres of knowledge and her ease for writing, led her to condense all that knowledge into different texts where she crumbled all the basic mathematical concepts.
Love came as a surprise and - painfully - his marriage was the engine that raised his fame. People began to know his work as a poet and over time he was allowed to teach - of course, to male students. His literary production was also prolific reaching 13 books of poetry.
The people who knew her marriage were outraged at how different it was from the rest: she did not stop writing or investigating; He continued to take transgressing the feudal laws of the time. The fatal and inexorable fate took the life of this woman when she was only 29 years old. He had no children, for he had devoted his whole life to his intellectual passions.
As scientist, engineer, botanist, inventor musician and artist, Da Vinci enjoyed an unbeatable world fame since the sixteenth century, Wang Zhenyi was erased from history; As it shows, maybe this is the first time in life that you hear something about it. It was not until 1994, when the International Astronomical Union "baptized" with its name a crater on the planet Venus.
The recognition of the work of this genius woman turns out to be on another planet, while in this we completely ignore the magnitude of her contributions and her love for knowledge.