Eleanor Robson

The Uses of Mathematics in Ancient Iraq, 6000–600 BC

Every culture has mathematics, but some have more than others. The cuneiform cultures of the pre-Islamic Middle East left a particularly rich mathematical heritage, some of which profoundly influenced late Classical and medieval Arabic traditions, but which was for the most part lost in antiquity and has begun to be recovered only in the last century or so.

Ancient accounting in the modern mathematics classroom

Florida State University owns a collection of twenty-five cuneiform tablets, acquired from Edgar J Banks in the 1920s. We describe their rediscovery, present an edition of one of them (a twenty-first century BC labour account from the Sumerian city of Umma), and discuss their potential for use in undergraduate mathematics education.1 1We are very grateful to Steve Garfinkle, Denise Giannino, John Larson, Lucia Patrick, Plato L Smith II, and Giesele Towels for their help in the research and writing of this article.

Tablettes mathématiques de Nippur Varia Anatolica, XVIII

debates on science as historical understanding like Wilhelm Windelband or Wilhelm Dilthey; Adalbert Stifter (the writer and school inspector who was offered*and turned down*the job of overseeing the reformed Vienna academic secondary schools); Carl Menger and the Vienna School of Economics (stressing value instead of capital, in a move much like the Exner’s own); Otto Bauer and various ‘Austro-Marxist’ social-engineering projects of ‘Red Vienna’; and public health debates about education (many of which were central to Arthur Schnitzler’s work, and which figured in the establishment of the Polyklinik as a reform hospital). These elisions reveal the Exners as rather more socially conservative than Coen casts them, as they point toward parallel projects in different domains that might be considered in a broader presentation of the epoch. Such attention is, of course, not to be expected of a single book, and so should not be taken as rejection of a fine book, but rather simply as a warning that the Exners’ point of view is not the only one available. This era incubated many of the modern social sciences and social medicine practices through the actions of a number of intermarried groups much like this extraordinary family, albeit in other disciplines. Overall, Coen has opened up a new vista into that Vienna, and for that, she deserves great praise. This book is a must.