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Otto E. Neugebauer | |
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| Born | (1899-05-26)May 26, 1899 |
| Died | February 19, 1990(1990-02-19) (aged 90) |
| Spouse | Grete Bruck |
| Children | Margo Neugebauer,Gerry Neugebauer |
| Parent | Rudolph Neugebauer |
Otto Eduard Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 – February 19, 1990) was an Austrian-Americanmathematician andhistorian of science who became known for his research on thehistory of astronomy and the otherexact sciences as they were practiced inantiquity and theMiddle Ages. By studyingclay tablets, he discovered that the ancientBabylonians knew much more aboutmathematics andastronomy than had been previously realized. TheNational Academy of Sciences has called Neugebauer "the most original and productive scholar of the history of the exact sciences, perhaps of thehistory of science, of our age."
Neugebauer was born inInnsbruck,Austria. His father Rudolph Neugebauer was a railroad construction engineer and a collector and scholar of Oriental carpets. His parents died during his early childhood. DuringWorld War I, Neugebauer enlisted in the Austrian Army and served as an artillery lieutenant on the Italian front and then in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp alongside fellow countrymanLudwig Wittgenstein. In 1919, he entered theUniversity of Graz inelectrical engineering andphysics and in 1921 he transferred to theUniversity of Munich. From 1922 to 1924, he studied mathematics at theUniversity of Göttingen underRichard Courant,Edmund Landau, andEmmy Noether. During 1924–1925, he was at theUniversity of Copenhagen, where his interests changed to the history of Egyptian mathematics.
He returned to Göttingen and remained there until 1933. His thesisDie Grundlagen der ägyptischen Bruchrechnung ("The Fundamentals of Egyptian Calculation with Fractions") (Springer, 1926) was a mathematical analysis of the table in theRhind Papyrus. In 1927, he received hisvenia legendi for the history of mathematics and served asPrivatdozent. In 1927, his first paper on Babylonian mathematics was an account of the origin of thesexagesimal system.
In 1929, Neugebauer foundedQuellen 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 theMoscow Papyrus, the most important text for geometry. Neugebauer had worked on the Moscow Papyrus inLeningrad in 1928.
In 1931, he founded the review journalZentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete (Zbl), his most important contribution to modern mathematics.[citation needed][1] WhenAdolf 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 theUniversity of Copenhagen as a full professor of mathematics. In 1936, he published a paper on the method of dating and analyzing texts usingdiophantine equations. During 1935–1937, he published a corpus of texts namedMathematische 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 andGreek mathematics. He was an Invited Speaker of theICM in 1928 in Bologna and a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1936 in Oslo.[2]
In 1939, after theZentralblatt was taken over by theNazis, he moved to the United States, joined the mathematics department atBrown University, and foundedMathematical Reviews. He became an American citizen and remained at Brown for most of his career, founding the History of Mathematics Department there in 1947 and becoming University Professor. Jointly with the American AssyriologistAbraham Sachs, he publishedMathematical Cuneiform Texts in 1945, which has remained a standard English-language work on Babylonian mathematics. In 1967, he was awarded theHenry Norris Russell Lectureship by theAmerican Astronomical Society. In 1977, he was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences, and in 1979, he received the Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics from theMathematical Association of America. In 1984, he moved to theInstitute for Advanced Study inPrinceton, where he had been a member since 1950.
Neugebauer was also interested inchronology. He was able to reconstruct theAlexandrian 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 preventEaster from ever coinciding withPassover. 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 Greekpapyrus, Neugebauer discovered the most important single piece of evidence to date for the extensive transmission of Babylonian astronomy to the Greeks and for the continuing use of Babylonian methods for 400 years even afterPtolemy wrote theAlmagest. His last paper, "From Assyriology to Renaissance Art", published in 1989, detailed the history of a single astronomical parameter, the mean length of thesynodic month, fromcuneiform tablets, to the papyrus fragment just mentioned, to the Jewish calendar, to an early 15th-centurybook of hours.
In 1986, Neugebauer was awarded theBalzan Prize "for his fundamental research into the exact sciences in the ancient world, in particular, on ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian andGreek astronomy, which has put our understanding ofancient 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 toEgyptian andBabylonian mathematics, and then took up the history of mathematical astronomy. In a career which spanned sixty-five years, he largely created modern understanding of mathematicalastronomy in Babylon andEgypt, throughGreco-Roman antiquity,to India, theIslamic world, andEurope of the Middle Ages and theRenaissance. The noted physicist and astronomerGerry Neugebauer atCaltech was his son.
In 1936, he gave aplenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo. This was about pre-Greek mathematics and its position relative to the Greek.
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