The arrangement of rods was precisely
that of the numbers in a determinant The Chinese, therefore, early developed the
idea of subtracting columns and rows as in simplification of a determinant
Mikami, China, pp 30, 93 Seki Kowa, the greatest of the Japanese Mathematicians of seventeenth
century in his work ‘Kai Fukudai no Ho’ in 1683 showed that he had the idea of
determinants and of their expansion But he used this device only in eliminating a
quantity from two equations and not directly in the solution of a set of simultaneous
linear equations