New Book from VRS Alum Mathieu Ossendrijver

Mathieu Ossendrijver, one of ISAW's visiting research scholars in 2010-11, has published a new book entitled Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy: Procedure Texts, part of the Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences series from Springer. The book contains a new analysis of the procedure texts of Babylonian mathematical astronomy. These cuneiform tablets, excavated in Babylon and Uruk and dating from 350-50 BCE, contain computational instructions that represent the earliest known form of mathematical astronomy of the ancient world. The book includes new translations of all 108 available tablets accompanied by commentaries and color photographs of the tablets. The preceding chapters are devoted to documentary, lexical, semantic, mathematical and astronomical aspects of the procedure texts. Special attention is given to issues of  mathematical representation, a topic that had previously been largely ignored. Mathematical concepts are presented in a didactic fashion, setting out from the most elementary ones (numbers and elementary operations) to more complex ones (algorithms and computational systems). Chapters devoted to the planets and the Moon contain updated and expanded reconstructions and astronomical interpretations of the algorithms.

From: http://www.springer.com/mathematics/history+of+mathematics/book/978-1-4614-3781-9