Zou Yan

Zou Yan (305 to 240 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher of the Warring States period, best known as the representative thinker of the Yin and Yang School, or School of Naturalists, during the Hundred Schools of Thought era. A scholar of the Jixia Academy in the state of Qi, he combined and systematized two current theories, yin and yang and the five phases of metal, wood, water, fire and earth. His writings are lost and survive only in quotations in early Chinese texts, with the fullest account in the biography by Sima Qian in the Records of the Grand Historian, which describes him as a polymath. Joseph Needham called him the real founder of all Chinese scientific thought, and later tradition associated him with Daoism and the origins of Chinese alchemy.