Otto E. Neugebauer

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Otto E. Neugebauer
Born(1899-05-26)May 26, 1899
DiedFebruary 19, 1990(1990-02-19) (aged 90)
SpouseGrete Bruck
ChildrenMargo Neugebauer, Gerry Neugebauer
ParentRudolph Neugebauer

Otto Eduard Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 – February 19, 1990) was an Austrian-American

National Academy of Sciences has called Neugebauer "the most original and productive scholar of the history of the exact sciences, perhaps of the history of science
, of our age."

Career

Neugebauer was born in

University of Munich. From 1922 to 1924, he studied mathematics at the University of Göttingen under Richard Courant, Edmund Landau, and Emmy Noether. During 1924–1925, he was at the University of Copenhagen
, where his interests changed to the history of Egyptian mathematics.

He returned to Göttingen and remained there until 1933. His thesis Die Grundlagen der ägyptischen Bruchrechnung ("The Fundamentals of Egyptian Calculation with Fractions") (Springer, 1926) was a mathematical analysis of the table in the

venia legendi for the history of mathematics and served as Privatdozent. In 1927, his first paper on Babylonian mathematics was an account of the origin of the sexagesimal
system.

In 1929, Neugebauer founded Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik (QS), a Springer series devoted to the history of the mathematical sciences, in which he published extended papers on Egyptian computational techniques in arithmetic and geometry, including the

Leningrad
in 1928.

In 1931, he founded the review journal

Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete (Zbl), his most important contribution to modern mathematics.[citation needed] When Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Neugebauer was asked to sign an oath of loyalty to the new German government, but he refused and was promptly suspended from employment. In 1934, he joined the University of Copenhagen as a full professor of mathematics. In 1936, he published a paper on the method of dating and analyzing texts using diophantine equations. During 1935–1937, he published a corpus of texts named Mathematische Keilschrift-Texte (MKT). MKT was a colossal work, in size, detail, and depth, and its contents showed that Babylonian mathematics far surpassed anything one could imagine from a knowledge of Egyptian and Greek mathematics. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1928 in Bologna and a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1936 in Oslo.[1]

In 1939, after the Zentralblatt was taken over by the

National Academy of Sciences, and in 1979, he received the Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America. In 1984, he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
, where he had been a member since 1950.

Neugebauer was also interested in chronology. He was able to reconstruct the Alexandrian Christian calendar and its origin from the Alexandrian Jewish calendar as of about the 4th century, at least 200 years prior to any other source for either calendar. Thus, the Jewish calendar was derived by combining the 19-year cycle using the Alexandrian year with the seven-day week, and was then slightly modified by the Christians to prevent Easter from ever coinciding with Passover. The ecclesiastical calendar, considered by church historians to be highly scientific and deeply complex, turned out to be quite simple.

In 1988, by studying a scrap of Greek

synodic month, from cuneiform tablets, to the papyrus fragment just mentioned, to the Jewish calendar, to an early 15th-century book of hours
.

In 1986, Neugebauer was awarded the

ancient science
on a new footing and illuminated its transmission to the classical and medieval worlds. For his outstanding success in promoting interest and further research in the history of science" (Motivation of the Balzan General Prize Committee). Neugebauer donated the prize money of 250,000 Swiss francs to the Institute for Advanced Study.

Neugebauer began his career as a mathematician, then turned to

Caltech
was his son.

Prizes and honors

In 1936, he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo. This was about pre-Greek mathematics and its position relative to the Greek.

Select publications

Articles

  • 'The Chronology of the Hammurabi Age', in Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. lxi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941).
  • "The History of Ancient Astronomy Problems and Methods." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 4 (1945): 1–38.
  • "Studies in Ancient Astronomy. VIII. The Water Clock in Babylonian Astronomy." Isis, Vol. 37, No. 1/2, pp. 37–43. (May, 1947). JSTOR link. Reprinted in Neugebauer (1983), pp. 239–245 (*).
  • "The Early History of the Astrolabe." Isis 40 (1949): 240–56.
  • "The Study of Wretched Subjects." Isis 42 (1951): 111.
  • "On the 'Hippopede' of Eudoxus." Scripta Mathematica 19 (1953): 225–29.
  • "Apollonius' Planetary Theory." Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 8 (1955): 641–48.
  • "The Equivalence of Eccentric and Epicyclic Motion According to Apollonius." Scripta Mathematica 24 (1959): 5–21.
  • "Thabit Ben Qurra 'On the Solar Year' and 'On the Motion of the Eighth Sphere.'" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106 (1962): 264–98.
  • (with Richard A. Parker) "Egyptian Astronomical Texts: III. Decans, Planets, Constellations, and Zodiacs." (Brown University Press, 1969)
  • "On the Allegedly Heliocentric Theory of Venus by Heraclides Ponticus." American Journal of Philology 93 (1973): 600–601.
  • "Notes on Autolycus." Centaurus 18 (1973): 66–69.

Books

  • (with Abraham Sachs, eds.). Mathematical Cuneiform Texts. American Oriental Series, vol. 29. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1945.
  • The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952; 2nd edition, Brown University Press, 1957; reprint, New York: Dover publications, 1969.
  • Astronomical Cuneiform Texts. 3 volumes. London:1956; 2nd edition, New York: Springer, 1983. (Commonly abbreviated as ACT)
  • The Astronomical Tables of al-Khwarizmi. Historiskfilosofiske Skrifter udgivet af Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Bind 4, nr. 2. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1962.
  • Ethiopic Astronomy and Computus. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1979.
  • A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 3 vols. Berlin: Springer, 1975. (Commonly abbreviated as HAMA.)
  • Astronomy and History: Selected Essays. New York: Springer, 1983.
  • (with

References

  1. ^ Neugebauer, O. (1937). "Über griechische Mathematik und ihr Verhältnis zur Vorgriechischen". In: Comptes rendus du Congrès international des mathématiciens: Oslo, 1936. Vol. 1. pp. 157–170.

External links