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

Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990) was, for many, an enigmatic personality. Trained as a mathematician in Graz, Munich, and Göttingen, 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 Göttingen, he wrote his dissertation on this very topic. In 1927 he published the first of many studies on Babylonian mathematics and astronomy, a pioneering study on the evolution of the sexagesimal (base 60) number system (Neugebauer 1927). These works received high praise from leading Egyptologists and Assyriologists, helping to launch Neugebauer’s career as a historian of ancient mathematics and exact sciences. Indeed, he would go on to revolutionize research in these areas, leaving a deep imprint on our understanding of these ancient scientific cultures to this very day.