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In the eighteenth century, Korean Confucian scholars began reading and discussing books from China explaining the European approach to mathematics. Those books, written by Jesuit missionaries in China and their Chinese disciples, were intended to shatter confidence in Neo-Confucianism and lead those to read them to accept Western reasoning as superior in mathematical as well as ethical and theological reasoning. However, because the analytical and abstract character of Western mathematics conflicted with the Neo-Confucian preference for a concrete and contextualized approach, the use of mathematics to convert Confucians to Christianity was, with a few exceptions, ineffective. Koreans were usually able to extract useful formulae from those Western books while ignoring the logic behind them.
