VRS Alumn Mathieu Ossendrijver and ISAW Prof. Alexander Jones featured in Science

Former VRS Mathieu Ossendrijver was featured yesterday in Science for his research suggesting that the ancient people of Babylon were the first to use sophisticated geometry. His research shows that the Ancient Babylonians were using geometrical calculations to track Jupiter across the night sky.

From Science:
Astroarchaeologist Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin bases his findings on a reexamination of clay tablets, one of them unknown until recently, dating from 350 B.C.E. to 50 B.C.E. One week each year for the past 14 years, Ossendrijver has made a pilgrimage to the British Museum’s vast collection of tablets inscribed in the Babylonian cuneiform script. He was trying to solve a puzzle posed by two tablets dealing with astronomical calculations: They also contained instructions for constructing a trapezoidal figure that seemed unrelated to anything astronomical... Examining all of the tablets at the British Museum, Ossendrijver figured out that the trapezoid calculations were a tool for calculating Jupiter’s displacement each day along the ecliptic, the path that the sun appears to trace through the stars. The computations recorded on the tablets covered a period of 60 days, beginning on a day when the giant planet first appeared in the night sky just before dawn.

The Babylonians had developed “abstract mathematical, geometrical ideas about the connection between motion, position and time that are so common to any modern physicist or mathematician,” Prof Mathieu Ossendrijver says.

ISAW Professor Alexander Jones notes in the Science article, "Such concepts have not been found earlier than in 14th century European texts on moving bodies. Their presence … testifies to the revolutionary brilliance of the unknown Mesopotamian scholars who constructed Babylonian mathematical astronomy.” Professor Jones is also credited in an article by The New York Times: "'I think it’s quite a remarkable discovery,' said Alexander Jones, a professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, who was not involved with the research. 'It’s really quite clear from the text.'"

Featured articles found in The New York Times, BBC, and NPR.