Mathieu Ossendrijver

Visiting Research Scholar 2010-2011

Mathieu Ossendrijver received a PhD in astrophysics at the University of Utrecht and studied Assyriology at the University of Freiburg i.Br. His current research concerns Babylonian mathematical astronomy of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods. Since 2006 he has been working on a new edition of the corpus of Babylonian mathematical astronomy as a research associate of the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IANES) of the University of Tübingen with a grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG). He is interested in various linguistic, astronomical, mathematical and contextual aspects of this corpus. The first part concerning procedure texts was recently completed, and submitted for his PhD at the University of Tubingen. At ISAW Mathieu will be working on a second volume with the tabular texts, and he will investigate the community of astronomers who wrote these texts, and the purposes of Babylonian mathematical astronomy.