ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Seki Takakazu

Seki Takakazu was a very clever man who lived a long time ago in Japan. He was very good at mathematics and loved solving problems that involved numbers.

One of the things he is most famous for is something called the "Seki's Algorithm" or "Seki's Method". This was a way of multiplying really big numbers together by breaking them down into smaller, more manageable pieces. It's kind of like if you had a big tower of blocks, and you wanted to count how many blocks there were. Instead of trying to count them all at once, you could break the tower into smaller stacks and count each stack separately, then add up all the numbers to find the total.

Seki was also interested in something called "irrational numbers", which are numbers that can never be written as a simple fraction. These are tricky to work with, but Seki was able to figure out some ways to calculate them more accurately than anyone had before. This was a big deal because it helped improve our understanding of things like circles and spheres, which are shaped like balls and tubes, and are really important in math and science.

Overall, Seki was a very smart and creative mathematician who made some important contributions to the field of mathematics. Many people still study his work and use his methods to this day!