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Historiography of Mathematics in the 19th and 20th CenturiesMesopotamian Mathematics, Seen “from the Inside” (by Assyriologists) and “from the Outside” (by Historians of Mathematics)

Historiography of Mathematics in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Mesopotamian Mathematics, Seen... [Since the 1950s, “Babylonian mathematics” has often served to open expositions of the general history of mathematics. Since it is written in a language and a script which only specialists understand, it has always been dealt with differently by the “insiders”, the Assyriologists who approached the texts where it manifests itself as philologists and historians of Mesopotamian culture, and by “outsiders”, historians of mathematics who had to rely on second-hand understanding of the material (actually, of as much of this material as they wanted to take into account), but who saw it as a constituent of the history of mathematics. The article deals with how these different approaches have looked in various periods: pre-decipherment speculations; the early period of deciphering, 1847–1929; the “golden decade”, 1929–1938, where workers with double competence (primarily NeugebauerNeugebauer, Otto (1899–1990)and Thureau-DanginThureau-Dangin, François (1872–1944)) attacked the corpus and demonstrated the Babylonians to have possessed unexpectedly sophisticated mathematical knowledge; and the ensuing four decades, where some mopping-up without change of perspective was all that was done by a handful of Assyriologists and Assyriologically competent historians of mathematics, while most Assyriologists lost interest completely, and historians of mathematics believed to possess the definitive truth about the topic in NeugebauerNeugebauer, Otto (1899–1990)’s popularizations.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Historiography of Mathematics in the 19th and 20th CenturiesMesopotamian Mathematics, Seen “from the Inside” (by Assyriologists) and “from the Outside” (by Historians of Mathematics)

Part of the Trends in the History of Science Book Series
Editors: Remmert, Volker R.; Schneider, Martina R.; Kragh Sørensen, Henrik
Høyrup, Jens
Historiography of Mathematics in the 19th and 20th Centuries — Dec 9, 2016
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References (69)

Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
ISBN
978-3-319-39647-7
Pages
53 –78
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-39649-1_4
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Since the 1950s, “Babylonian mathematics” has often served to open expositions of the general history of mathematics. Since it is written in a language and a script which only specialists understand, it has always been dealt with differently by the “insiders”, the Assyriologists who approached the texts where it manifests itself as philologists and historians of Mesopotamian culture, and by “outsiders”, historians of mathematics who had to rely on second-hand understanding of the material (actually, of as much of this material as they wanted to take into account), but who saw it as a constituent of the history of mathematics. The article deals with how these different approaches have looked in various periods: pre-decipherment speculations; the early period of deciphering, 1847–1929; the “golden decade”, 1929–1938, where workers with double competence (primarily NeugebauerNeugebauer, Otto (1899–1990)and Thureau-DanginThureau-Dangin, François (1872–1944)) attacked the corpus and demonstrated the Babylonians to have possessed unexpectedly sophisticated mathematical knowledge; and the ensuing four decades, where some mopping-up without change of perspective was all that was done by a handful of Assyriologists and Assyriologically competent historians of mathematics, while most Assyriologists lost interest completely, and historians of mathematics believed to possess the definitive truth about the topic in NeugebauerNeugebauer, Otto (1899–1990)’s popularizations.]

Published: Dec 9, 2016

Keywords: Cuneiform script, decipherment; Mesopotamian mathematics, historiography; Hincks, Edward; Rawlinson, Henry; Oppert, Jules; Thureau-Dangin, François; Neugebauer, Otto

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