"How formulaic is a mathematical algorithm expressed in natural language?" I will present an example of a rhetorically formulated Chinese 19-th century mathematical text, that bears stable linguistic expressions to make inductive arguments. For comparison, I will also present an equivalent example of a German language algorithm. Having read a large amount of Chinese (traditional) mathematical texts, I can intuitively distinguish between more or less formulaic ones depending on different structural and logical criteria. But could there be a way to quantify such a degree of formulaic style ? This is the challenging question that I bring for discussion with the experts in corpus linguistics.