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After Neugebauer: Recent Developments in Mesopotamian Mathematics

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A Mathematician's Journeys

Part of the book series: Archimedes ((ARIM,volume 45))

Abstract

When Otto Neugebauer began writing on Old Babylonian mathematics in the late 1920s, despite a certain amount of pre-history and heroic efforts by early pioneers, it was still a little-studied and poorly understood area. Once he engaged with the subject, a torrent of papers followed, leading up to the publication of the monumental Mathematische Keilschrift-Texte (MKT) in three volumes in 1935 and 1937. The appearance in 1945 of Mathematical Cuneiform Texts (MCT (Neugebauer and Sachs 1945)), mostly concerned with publishing tablets from Yale that had not been available to him earlier in Europe, as well as the infamous Plimpton 322, essentially completed his project. Neugebauer had read, translated, understood and described in precise mathematical detail the known corpus of Old Babylonian problem texts, as well as giving a categorization of the various types of table texts. Neugebauer himself moved on and, while his work on astronomy continued for the rest of his life, he rarely published on mathematics again. What was there left to do?

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, USA

    Duncan J. Melville

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  1. Duncan J. Melville
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Correspondence to Duncan J. Melville .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst for Study of the Ancient World, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Alexander Jones

  2. CNRS & Université Paris Diderot, Laboratoire SPHERE, Paris CX 05, France

    Christine Proust

  3. Brown University, Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

    John M. Steele

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Melville, D.J. (2016). After Neugebauer: Recent Developments in Mesopotamian Mathematics. In: Jones, A., Proust, C., Steele, J. (eds) A Mathematician's Journeys. Archimedes, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25865-2_8

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