Search results for "Sexagesimal"

Otto Neugebauer and the Göttingen Approach to History of the Exact Sciences

2018

Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990) was, for many, an enigmatic personality. Trained as a mathematician in Graz, Munich, and Gottingen, he had not yet completed his doctoral research when in 1924 Harald Bohr, brother of the famous physicist, invited him to Copenhagen to work together on Bohr’s new theory of almost periodic functions. Quite by chance, Bohr asked Neugebauer to write a review of T. Eric Peet’s recently published edition of the Rhind Papyrus (Neugebauer 1925). In the course of doing so, Neugebauer became utterly intrigued by Egyptian methods for calculating fractions as sums of unit fractions (e.g. 3/5 = 1/3 + 1/5 + 1/15). When he returned to Gottingen, he wrote his dissertation on thi…