national academy of sciences

Otto E. Neugebauer

18991990

A Biographical Memoir by
N . M . Sw e r d l o w

Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Academy of Sciences.

Biographical Memoir
Copyright 1998
National Academies Press
washington d.c.

Courtesy of Brown University Photo Laboratory

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER
May 26, 1899February 19, 1990
BY N. M. SWERDLOW

the most original and productive

scholar of the history of the exact sciences, perhaps
of the history of science, of our age. He began as a mathematician, turned first to Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics, and then took up the history of mathematical astronomy, to which he afterward devoted the greatest part
of his attention. In a career of sixty-five years, he to a great
extent created our understanding of mathematical astronomy
from Babylon and Egypt, through Greco-Roman antiquity,
to India, Islam, and Europe of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Through his colleagues, students, and many readers,
his influence on the study of the history of the exact sciences remains profound, even definitive.
Neugebauer was born in Innsbruck, Austria, his father
Rudolph Neugebauer a railroad construction engineer and
a collector and scholar of Oriental carpets. His family soon
moved to Graz where his parents died when he was quite
young. He attended the Akademisches Gymnasium, and was
far more interested in mathematics, mechanics, and technical drawing than in the required courses in Greek and Latin.
Because his family was Protestant, he was exempted from
mandatory instruction in religion, which also pleased him.
In 1917 he learned that he could receive his graduation
TTO NEUGEBAUER WAS

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

certificate without passing a Greek examination if he enlisted in the Austrian Army, which he promptly did. Before
long, he found himself an artillery lieutenant, principally a
forward observer, on the Italian front. He later remarked
mordantly that these were among the happiest days of his
life. Following his discharge, in the fall of 1919 he entered
the University of Graz in electrical engineering and physics, and in 1921 transferred to the University of Munich,
where he attended lectures by Arnold Sommerfeld and Arthur
Rosenthal. He had lost his entire inheritance, safely invested
in government bonds, through the Austrian hyperinflation,
and he spent a miserable winter with little food and water
frozen in his room each morning.
During this year his interests changed to mathematics,
and in the fall of 1922 following Sommerfelds advice he
moved on to the Mathematisches Institut at the University
of Gttingen. He began his studies with the new director of
the Institut, Richard Courant, who became a very close friend,
also took courses with Edmund Landau and Emmy Noether,
and in 1923 became an assistant at the Institut and special
assistant to Courant in 1924. Significantly, he was also in
charge of the Lesezimmer, the library. During 1924-25 he was
at the University of Copenhagen with Harald Bohr, another
close friend, with whom he published in 1926 a paper on
differential equations with almost periodic functions, one
of Bohrs specialties, which turned out to be his only paper
in pure mathematics.
For again, Neugebauers interests had changed, this time
to the history of Egyptian mathematics for which he studied Egyptian with Hermann Kees and Kurt Sethe. His thesis
Die Grundlagen der gyptischen Bruchrechnung (Springer, 1926),
was principally an analysis of the table in the Rhind Papyrus for the expression of fractions of the form 2/n as a sum
of different unit fractions, fractions with the numerator 1,

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

and curiously stirred up a good deal of controversy. In 1927

he received his venia legendi for the history of mathematics,
and in the fall term became Privatdozent and began lecturing on mathematics and on the history of ancient mathematics. At this time he married Grete Bruck, a fellow student and very fine mathematician, who later assisted him in
much of his work. They had two children, Margo, born in
1929, and Gerry in 1932. In 1929 he founded, with O. Toeplitz
and J. Stenzel as co-editors, Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte
der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik (QS), a Springer series
devoted to the history of the mathematical sciences and
divided into two parts, Abteilung A for the publication of
sources and B for studies, in which he published extended
papers on Egyptian computational techniques in arithmetic
and geometry (QS B 1, 1930-31). The previous year he had
gone to Leningrad to assist W. Struve in preparing for publication the Moscow Papyrus, the most important text for
geometry, which appeared in QS A 1 (1930).
Since 1927, however, he had been investigating a more
important and interesting subject, namely, Babylonian mathematics, for which he had learned Akkadian and worked in
Rome with Father P. A. Deimel, S. J., of the Pontificio Istituto
Biblico. His first paper on Babylonian mathematics, in 1927,
was an account of the origin of the sexagesimal system, and
by 1929 he was gathering new material at Berlin and other
collections for the publication of a substantially complete
corpus of texts. During the next few years, he published a
number of articles, mostly in QS B, and eventually published the corpus in Mathematische Keilschrift-Texte (MKT)
(QS A 3, 3 vols., 1935-37). At the beginning of the preface
he quoted Anatole France, one of his favorite authors:
Lembarras de lhistorien saccrot avec labondance des
documents. This was not the last time this was to prove
true. MKT is a colossal work, in size, in detail, in depth,

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

and its contents show that the riches of Babylonian mathematics far surpass anything one could imagine from a knowledge of Egyptian and Greek mathematics.
In l931 he became the founding editor of the review
journal Zentralblatt fr Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete (Zbl),
his most important contribution to modern mathematics.
The following year he was promoted to Extraordinarius,
founded Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete, a
Springer series of short monographs on current mathematics, and in 1933, with W. Flgge, the Zentralblatt fr Mechanik,
which was separated from Zbl. Then politics intervened. On
January 30, 1933, Hitler became chancellor, and the following April 7 the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service
authorized the removal of civil servants of non-Aryan descent or of uncertain loyalty. On Thursday, April 26, a local
newspaper carried the notice that six professors, including
Courant and Noether, were to be placed on leave. Courant
designated Neugebauer acting director of the institut, but
students were by then agitating to stop the lectures of Landau
and Paul Bernays and attacking Neugebauer as politisch
unzuverlssig politically unreliable (his political views were
always very liberal). That weekend he was asked to sign an
oath of loyalty to the new government, and when he refused was promptly suspended as untragbar and denied access to the Institut building. Why untragbar (intolerable)?
Here is one possible reason: A Nazi official once requested
that he explain why he was in Leningrad in 1928, since it
might be thought he was secretly a Bolshevik. His answer
was to point out that in 1930 he was at the Vatican, so
perhaps they might suspect that he was secretly a Jesuit.
After several months of uncertainty about what would happen next, Harald Bohr arranged a three-year appointment
as professor at Copenhagen, which Neugebauer took up in
January 1934.

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

In Copenhagen he prepared for the summer term a series of lectures on Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics
that became the first of his books directed to a general
readership, Vorgriechische Mathematik (Springer, 1934), which
was intended as the first volume of a set of three called
Vorlesungen ber Geschichte der antiken mathematischen
Wissenschaften. The second was to be on Greek mathematics, specifically Archimedes and Apollonius, and on preEuclidean mathematics, showing its relation to Babylonian,
and the third on mathematical astronomy, principally on
Babylonian astronomy and on Ptolemy. So far he had written only a single paper touching on Babylonian astronomy,
a review of The Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga (1928) by Langdon,
Fotheringham, and Schoch, in which he demolished the
chronology of the Old Babylonian Dynasty that had been
established from heliacal risings and settings of Venus. In
1938 he did something similar to Egyptian chronology by
showing the Bedeutungslosigkeit of the Sothic Cycle for dating the introduction of the Egyptian calendar.
However, the three-volume Vorlesungen were never completed, as he later told the story, for the following reason:
While working on the mathematical cuneiform texts for
MKT, he also considered it efficient to write the account of
the astronomical cuneiform texts, principally ephemerides
in the form of arithmetic functions for computing lunar
and planetary phenomena, for the third volume. These had
originally been identified by J. N. Strassmaier and deciphered
by J. Epping in the 1880s. Since many had been published
and analyzed by F. X. Kugler in Die babylonische Mondrechnung
(1900) and Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel (1907-24), it
appeared reasonable to summarize Kuglers results and extend them to the few more recently published texts, about
fifty in all. In order to restore damaged and missing sections of texts, he developed procedures using linear

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

diophantine equations with the number of periods and the

number of excess lines of each arithmetic function in the
ephemerides as unknowns. The result of these checks was
the joining and dating of many previously unrelated fragments, the insight that some functions ran continuously for
hundreds of years, and in general a far deeper understanding of the mathematical structure of the texts. He realized
that what was now required was nothing less than a new
edition of all the texts with a methodologically consistent
analysis, a project going far beyond his original intention.
So he put aside Greek mathematics and went to work seriously on Babylonian astronomy, and at first the results came
rapidly, beginning with a paper in 1936 on the method of
dating and analyzing texts using diophantine equations. He
then published a series of papers, in the first of which he
set out a proposal for a complete edition of all classes of
Babylonian astronomical texts: mathematical, observational,
and astrological, that is, celestial omens, with the cooperation of additional collaborators. In 1936-37 he had lectured
on lunar and eclipse theory, the first results of his new
analyses and the basis of two papers in QS B 4 in which he
showed the applications of his methods. But then came the
events of the fall of 1938, and it was to be many years
before he, and he alone, completed his part in this great
enterprise.
Throughout this entire period, as conditions continued
to deteriorate in Germany, there was concern about Zbl,
edited by Neugebauer with the assistance of his wife in
Copenhagen and published by Springer in Berlin. On March
14, 1938, Wilhelm Blaschke of Hamburg, a member of the
board of editors, wrote to him that in his opinion it appeared that the number of German contributors and the
proportion of the German language in Zbl had declined
steadily, and if this continued there would sooner or later

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

be difficulties for the publisher. Neugebauer sent a sharp

reply. From its first day, he wrote, Zbl had been an international journal using the most qualified reviewers. If the proportion of English had increased, this was simply because
the production of mathematics in America had increased
and the most competent reviewers happened to be American. (In fact, at that time about half the 300 or so reviewers
were in America and England and only about 60 in Germany, with entire fields completely unrepresented. And many
of the reviews in German were actually written by Russians.)
The changes intended by Blaschke would have destroyed
Zbl, and in the fall the threat became a reality. When
Neugebauer received the October 8 index issue, he found
that Tullio Levi-Civita had been deleted from the editorial
board. He wrote to Ferdinand Springer about this, and received a reply that Levi-Civitas name had been removed
because he had been dismissed from his professorship in
Rome due to the (anti-Semitic) legislation in Italy. Springer
went on to request that, in accordance with the German
mathematicians and the zustndigen Stellen (cognizant authorities), the work of German mathematicians no longer
be reviewed by Emigranten and that Neugebauer make an
unconditional and binding promise to this by December 1.
It is evident that Springers hand was forced, but it is also
evident that conditions had become impossible. Neugebauer
immediately refused to accept the terms, and wrote to members of the editorial board informing them that he intended
to resign as of December 1 and encouraging them to do
the same. On November 14 Courant, now at New York University, received a cable: Common immediate resignation
of American editors very desirable. Neugebauer. He also
sent a printed post card to all reviewers announcing his
resignation. The effect was dramatic. Letters and telegrams
of resignation were sent to Springer by Bohr, G. H. Hardy,

10

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

Courant, J. D. Tamarkin, and O. Veblen, members of the

editorial board, and by a very large number of reviewers.
English-language contributions to Zbl were greatly reduced
by the middle of 1939 and all but gone by the beginning of
1940. (Zbl ceased publication in 1944. Since its resumption
in 1948, every issue has carried the notice Founded by O.
Neugebauer.)
It was clear that Zbl could no longer be relied on, and in
the United States action was immediately undertaken to
replace it and bring in Neugebauer. Veblen had been in
correspondence about the situation with R. G. D. Richardson,
secretary of the American Mathematical Society and dean
of the graduate school at Brown University, and Richardson
moved fast. There were two principal forces working to bring
Neugebauer to Brown. One was Richardson, among the first
and strongest advocates of the new journal, who arranged
for Brown to provide facilities; the other was R. C. Archibald,
a historian of mathematics who had built a splendid mathematics collection in the Brown library. On December 20
Richardson and H. M. Wriston, president of Brown, each
wrote to Neugebauer to offer him a professorship in the
mathematics department, and Richardson also asked him
to direct the American equivalent of Zbl. He came to Providence on February 16 for a stay of ten weeks. President
Wriston announced his acceptance of the professorship on
February 27, and arrangements were made for beginning
work on Mathematical Reviews (MR) that summer. In May he
returned to Copenhagen, stopping in Cambridge on the
way to give the W. Rouse Ball Lectures at Trinity College.
By mid-summer he was back in Providence with his family,
and was soon joined by Olaf Schmidt, his and Bohrs student and his research assistant in Copenhagen, who continued as his assistant while an instructor in the mathematics
department. The initial work was setting up MR for which

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

11

350 reviewers and 700 subscribers were enlisted before the

first issue appeared in January 1940. It was decided to begin with articles published after the middle of 1939, and
the first issue actually appeared on time in January 1940.
Still more remarkable, at the end of the first fiscal year, of
an anticipated budget of $20,000, there remained a surplus
of more than $5,000, something that would now amaze the
American Mathematical Society and MR. After overseeing
MR for its first few years, he turned over much of the editorial responsibility to Willy Feller, who became the executive
editor in 1944.
From the moment he arrived in the United States,
Neugebauer began writing in English. He also applied for
American citizenship immediately, and he never again set
foot in Germany. There is a story concerning Neugebauers
use of English, known to some mathematicians. In March
of 1941 he received a letter from a former colleague from
Gttingen, then in Leipzig and a contributor to Zbl, advising him that, as the director of two international journals,
if he valued his relations with German mathematicians, he
should take the small extra trouble to use his Muttersprache.
Can you not, he asked, at least show consideration for feelings you do not share? Neugebauers reply was directly to
the point:
As to the last paragraph of your letter, I must remark that the language I
use in my letters does not depend on my mother but on my secretary. It
interests me very much that the so-called German mathematicians now
require the editor of an international journal to use their language. During
the time I was editor of the Zentralblatt, no American mathematician required that I use the English language. I regret, however, that you do not
know me personally well enough to know that I would prefer to use exactly
the language that I want to use, even if I have to interrupt my relations
with German mathematicians.

During his first several years at Brown, Neugebauer pub-

12

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

lished a number of general papers on ancient astronomy

and mathematics, describing in outline the content of these
sciences, his methods of interpretation, and what he considered the most interesting areas for future research. These
papers, later reprinted in Astronomy and History (1983), were
not only the introduction of his interests and methods in
English, but were also the first extensive presentations of
his work for a general readership of historians of science
and humanists, showing the excitement of a new discovery
of the sciences of antiquity. The culmination of these writings was The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (1951, 2nd ed. 1957),
a survey of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics and astronomy, and their relation to Hellenistic science and its
descendants. But it is far more than a survey of these sciences, for Neugebauer here allowed himself the freedom to
comment on subjects from antiquity to the Renaissance.
The expert can learn something from it, and from its notes,
every time it is read, and for the general reader it is, in my
opinion, the finest book ever written on any aspect of ancient science.
Neugebauer also turned Brown into the leading institution for the study of the history of the exact sciences. In his
first year he taught Babylonian astronomy. A year later he
gave a series of public lectures on ancient chronology, and
he lectured frequently at other universities. Together with
Archibald, he founded a new journal of the history of the
mathematical sciences called Eudemus, to be published by
Munksgaard with subvention by Brown. The first issue appeared in 1941, but then the war made its continuation
impossible. In the spring of 1941 he gave a lecture at the
Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and there
met a young Assyriologist, Abraham Sachs, who had received
his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1939 and was working
on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, then as now the WPA of

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

13

Assyriology. Neugebauer decided immediately that this was

the person to continue the great project of publishing all
the astronomical texts, and arranged with the Rockefeller
Foundation for Sachs to come to Brown as a Rockefeller
Foundation fellow. When the Department of the History of
Mathematics was formed in 1947, Sachs joined the faculty,
becoming associate professor in 1949 and professor in 1953.
For more than forty years Sachs was Neugebauers closest
colleague and closest friend, with whom he discussed at
length nearly everything he wrote.
The next appointment was in Egyptology. Brown received
a bequest to form a Department of Egyptology, for which
Wriston told Neugebauer to find an Egyptologist. The choice
itself was not difficult. Since 1945 he had been corresponding on Egyptian astronomy with Richard Parker, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago who then became the field director of the Oriental Institutes epigraphic
survey at Luxor. It was not easy to get him, but Neugebauer
and Wriston did, and in the fall of 1949 Parker became the
Wilbour professor of Egyptology. In 1959 Gerald Toomer,
who, to the dismay of his colleagues in classics at Oxford,
had become interested in ancient mathematics, came as a
special student for two years, and after returning for successive summers became an associate professor and the third
member of the department in 1965. Finally, David Pingree,
who began working with Neugebauer while a graduate student and then a junior fellow in Sanskrit and classics at
Harvard, after eight years at Chicago, became the third
theft from the Oriental Institute, joining the department
in 1971, two years after Neugebauers nominal retirement
at seventy. With Neugebauer, Sachs, Parker, Toomer, and
Pingree, there was hardly a subject in the history of the
exact sciences from antiquity to the Renaissance, and hardly
a classical language, that was not covered at Brown. The

14

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

work of these scholars, of their students, their students

students, now extended to three generations, and of the
many visitors to the department is a direct product of the
school created by Neugebauer at Brown, and of course his
influence extends through his writings to every serious scholar
of the history of the mathematical sciences.
With an expert Assyriologist as collaborator, one of
Neugebauers first projects was to return to Babylonian mathematics and examine whatever might be contained in American collections. This was mostly done by Sachs, who found
substantial additions to the texts of MKT. Their edition and
analysis of the new texts, published as Mathematical Cuneiform Texts (MCT) in 1945, is not merely a supplement to
MKT, but an independent study that has been the standard
account of Babylonian mathematics in English ever since.
Still more extensive were the astronomical cuneiform texts,
of which the original study was complete by 1945, although
it continued to grow as more texts were discovered, and the
entire work was rewritten more than once to incorporate
them. Again Anatole France was right. Astronomical Cuneiform Texts (ACT) was finally published in three volumes in
1955 by the Institute for Advanced Study, and immediately
marked a new age in the study of ancient astronomy.
Neugebauer had assembled in all about three hundred texts,
most dating from the last three centuries B.C. Through
years of assiduous calculation, he had dated and completed
damaged texts and joined fragments, and he set out all this
material with full philological and technical analysis of the
underlying theory, computational procedure, and astronomical application. Every reading and every page of the manuscript had been gone over repeatedly by Sachs, whose name
Neugebauer always said really belonged on the publication.
The first volume contains ephemerides of lunar theory and
eclipses and the procedure texts for their computation, the

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

15

second planetary ephemerides and procedure texts, and

the third the translations of the restored ephemerides and
photographs or hand copies of all the texts. In the preface
he expressed his respect to the shades of the scribes of
Enuma-Anu-Enlil. By their untiring efforts they built the
foundations for the understanding of the laws of nature
which our generation is applying so successfully to the destruction of civilization. Yet they also provided hours of
peace for those who attempted to decode their lines of
thought two thousand years later.
Next was Egyptian astronomy. There are two sorts, from
older, purely Egyptian sources, such as tomb ceilings and
coffin lids, and from later, Hellenistic sources, monumental
zodiacs and papyri, sometimes showing Greek or Babylonian
influences. None of it is very sophisticated, and Neugebauer
was always at pains to lay the ghost of profound Egyptian
astronomical wisdom. During his last year in Copenhagen
he published with A. Volten in QS B 4 (1938) the demotic
Papyrus Carlsberg 9, of the second century A.D., on the 25year lunar cycle, and in 1940 there appeared with H. O.
Lange an edition of Papyrus Carlsberg 1, also of the second
century, but preserving a far older hieratic text with demotic
translation and commentary on celestial mythology and cosmology and the decans. Two years later he published the
known Hellenistic planetary texts and demotic horoscopes,
but the really extensive work was done together with Parker,
especially after he came to Brown and they began working
on an edition of all Egyptian sources. It was a task that took
more than twenty years to complete, but at last during 196069 the three volumes (in four) of Egyptian Astronomical Texts
(EAT) were published by Brown. Here it was at last, all the
Egyptian wisdom: decans, constellations, and star clocks of
the Middle and New Kingdoms, Hellenistic monumental
zodiacs and papyri, including all those previously published.

16

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

And what did it amount to? With particular per versity

Neugebauer began the ten-page section on Egypt in his
later History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy with the provocative sentence, Egypt has no place in a work on the
history of mathematical astronomy. Nevertheless, EAT is a
fascinating and beautiful work of scholarship, and through
it the content of Egyptian astronomy is now known and for
the most part understood.
Hellenistic sources were far more heterogeneous. In addition to Greek treatises in standard editions and the manuscript materials in the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum
Graecorum (CCAG), there were an unknown number of astronomical and astrological papyri. Neugebauer began gathering whatever he could findeventually many papyrologists
sent him anything with numbers on itand publishing occasional articles, something that continued for the rest of
his life. By luck, the chief librarian at Brown, Henry Bartlett
Van Hoesen, was a classicist and papyrologistthis was before university libraries were turned over to bureaucrats
with degrees in something called library scienceand together they began assembling an edition of all known Greek
horoscopes, both from literary sources and papyri. Their
publication, Greek Horoscopes (1959), remains the standard
work on its subject, unlikely to be superseded, and is also
an excellent introduction to the techniques of Greek astrology.
But there was a yet larger project, in fact the largest of
all. Ever since the promise of the third volume of the
Vorlesungen, Neugebauer intended to publish a history of
mathematical astronomy. The form and extent of the work
changed over time. Originally it was to have been on antiquity alone, but later it was to continue through the Middle
Ages and Renaissance as far as Kepler. Neugebauer was indefatigable in taking notes on sources with detailed analy-

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

17

ses. Already in Copenhagen he began analyzing the Almagest,

since it was intended for the Vorlesungen, and over the years
his notes extended to most published ancient texts, later
Greek texts in manuscript, Indian, Arabic, and medieval
Latin sources, and indeed on to Copernicus, Tycho, and
Kepler. When, after the publication of ACT, he began to
write all of this up, Anatole Frances dictum proved as true
as ever, so in the end the project was again restricted to
antiquity. A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (HAMA)
appeared in 1975 in three volumes as the first publication
in Springers Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics
and Physical Sciences, the relation of which to QS should be
obvious. Like ACT, it had the immediate effect of establishing the history of ancient astronomy on a new foundation,
and since the astronomy of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is in most respects a continuation of antiquity, it really placed the astronomy of more than two thousand years
on a new foundation. Neugebauer arranged the work to
cover the most important things first, namely, an exposition of the Almagest and what can be known of Ptolemys
more or less direct antecedents, Apollonius and Hipparchus,
and a systematic exposition of Babylonian astronomy going
beyond ACT both in the breadth of its subject and depth of
analysis, a section he was revising until the last minute before publication. After the notorious ten-page Book III
on Egypt, comes early Greek astronomy through the first
century B.C., concentrating upon whatever can seriously be
reconstructed of mathematical astronomy, including
Babylonian influences, from the surviving texts, unfortunately all elementary, supplemented by papyri, inscriptions,
and later sources. The fifth part, on Roman and late antiquity, is devoted mainly to planetary and lunar theory in
papyri, astrological sources, and, with more secure texts, to
Ptolemys works apart from the Almagest and to later sources,

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BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

principally Theons edition of Ptolemys Handy Tables. Finally, the sixth part is an appendix on the chronology, astronomy, and mathematics, including diophantine equations,
useful to the study of ancient mathematical astronomy, in
which he set out materials and methods assembled over
many years both from diverse sources and of his own invention.
For all its 1200 pages of text and nearly 250 pages of
figures HAMA is an economical work; its subject is the technical content of ancient mathematical astronomy, and cultural matters are kept to a minimum. I have mentioned
that at one time HAMA was to have covered a longer period. What happened to the rest? Over the years, Neugebauer
published parts of it separately, sometimes in collaborative
projects, and its parts are substantial. In fact, he was late to
come to the Middle Ages, his first important publications
being on the astronomy of Maimonides (1949) and a commentary on Maimonidess Sanctification of the New Moon translated by Solomon Gandz (1956), in earlier years a contributor to QS. It is best to consider the paralipomena to HAMA
by subject: Byzantine sources based on Arabic in the astronomical terminology of Vat. gr. 1058 (1960)later identified by Pingree as translations by Gregory Chioniadesand
the commentary on the treatise in Paris gr. 2425 (1969),
the treatise itself later published by Alexander Jones (1987);
Arabic in the translations and analyses of two works on the
motion of the eighth sphere and the length of the year
attributed (at least one falsely, it now appears) to Thabit
ibn Qurra (1962), and a large commentary on al-Khw a rizm i s
tables (1962), examining in particular their use of Indian
methods; Indian astronomy itself in his commentary to
Pingrees edition and translation of the Pacasiddh a ntik a
of Var a hamah i ra (1970); Renaissance astronomy with

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

19

N. M. Swerdlow in the analysis of Copernicuss De revolutionibus

(1984).
The last subject Neugebauer took up was Ethiopic astronomy, chronology, and computus, that is, the ecclesiastical calendar. He had long been intrigued by the primitive
astronomical section of the Book of Enoch, originally written
in Aramaic and surviving complete only in Ethiopic (Geez),
which appeared to contain simplified Babylonian elements,
and he also noticed from the catalogue of Ethiopic manuscripts in Vienna, passages that suggested a relation with
Hellenistic astronomy and calendars. The question was, what
was this material about, and was there more of it? After
learning Geezthe only Semitic language that is not perverse, he called it (since it includes the vowels)and studying many manuscripts, he found that the astronomical content was slight, but the calendrical and chronological
information preserved from late antiquity and the Middle
Ages was very interesting indeed. Chronology had in fact
always been his third subject besides astronomy and mathematics; earlier he had collaborated with W. Kendrick
Pritchett on The Calendars of Athens (1947) and analyzed
the calendar of the Trs riches heures for Millard Meiss (1974).
Now he again took up chronology seriously. Ethiopic Astronomy
and Computus (1979) is the summary of what he found,
organized by subject in alphabetical order. There is much
of interest here, but to name only the most significant result, he was able to reconstruct the Alexandrian Christian
calendar and its origin from the Alexandrian Jewish calendar as of about the fourth century, at least two hundred
years prior to any other source for either calendar. Thus,
the Jewish calendar was derived by combining the 19-year
cycle using the Alexandrian year with the seven-day week,
and was then slightly modified by the Christians to prevent
Easter from ever coinciding with Passover, which would be

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BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

a very great sin. Neugebauer was amused to point out that

the ecclesiastical calendar, considered by church historians
to be highly scientific and deeply complex, was actually primitively simple. He then published separately the astronomical chapters of the Book of Enoch (1981) in his own translation and commentar y, both rather different from the
literature on Enoch by Biblical scholars.
Considerably more complex than either of these was Abu
Shakers Chronography (1988), an analytical summary of a
chronological and calendrical treatise originally written in
Arabic by a thirteenth-century Coptic Jacobite. The treatise
probably contains more technical information on ecclesiastical calendars than any other source, including the curious
fact that the sequence of 29- and 30-day months is identical
in the Jewish and Islamic calendars, showing that the Islamic calendar was in fact derived from the Jewish by suppressing intercalation, in accordance with Muhammads prohibition. Thus far, I know of no reaction to this discovery.
Finally, in Chronography in Ethiopic Sources (1989), he assembled
a great deal of chronographical information, that is, intervals between epochs and dates of events, mostly in tabular
form.
A few years after he came to this country, Neugebauer
began to spend part of his time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and from 1950 for the remainder of his life was a long-term member, a continuous association of forty years. Robert Oppenheimer, then director,
had told him he would be welcome permanently any time
he wished, but he preferred to remain at Brown and visit
the Institute periodically. He always found the faculty and
visitors at the Institute stimulating; following his retirement
from Brown in 1969 and the death of his wife in 1970, he
regularly spent several weeks there each fall and spring,

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

21

and in the fall of 1984 he left Providence and moved permanently to the Institute.
Through these years, his late eighties, Neugebauers research continued to flourish at the Institute. He completed
and published his books on Ethiopic chronology, wrote articles, and returned to an analysis of Keplers Astronomia
nova. Then in the summer of 1988 he received a photograph of a scrap of papyrus with numbers on ithardly the
first timeand immediately went to work deciphering its
content. What he found was truly wonderful: a part of a
column concerned with the length of the month from a
Babylonian lunar ephemeris, known principally from tablets of the second century B.C., but here found in a Greek
papyrus of the second or third century A.D. Since a single
column is of no use by itself, the papyrus must once have
contained several columns, if not a complete ephemeris for
computing either the first visibility of the moon or the possibility of eclipses each month. This was the most important
single piece of evidence yet discovered for the extensive transmission of Babylonian astronomy to the Greeks, and just as
remarkable, for the continuing use of sophisticated
Babylonian methods for four hundred years, even after
Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, which, without the papyrus,
would have seemed unbelievable. As he so often remarked,
we know very little. The account of the papyrus was published in a memorial volume for Abe Sachs (1988).
If there is a single, central concern that runs through
Neugebauers work, it is an interest in mathematical science itself, apart from any particular application in any
particular civilization, as an expression of sheer ingenuity
in abstract thinking, an ingenuity apparent among mathematicians and astronomers whether their language was
Akkadian, Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, or Latin, and whatever
forms the mathematical sciences took in their day. From

22

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

this concern was born the detailed and technical cross-cultural approach, in no way described adequately as the study
of transmission, that he applied to the history of the exact sciences from the ancient Near East to the European
Renaissance. This can be seen, is perhaps summarized, in
his last paper, From Assyriology to Renaissance Art, published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
in 1989, which is on the history of a single astronomical
parameter, the mean length of the synodic month, from
cuneiform tablets, to the papyrus fragment just mentioned,
to the Jewish calendar, to an early fifteenth-century book of
hours. And for this concern with mathematical science itself, we must be grateful, for only a true mathematician,
- Neugebauer
which
always remained, would recognize and
expend the effort necessary to reveal the extraordinary ingenuity, creativity, and also continuity of Babylonian scribes,
of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, of Var a hamah i ra and alKhw a rizm i , of their descendants as far as the Renaissance,
and really up to the present day.
Neugebauer was the recipient of many honors. He received his first honorary degree, the one he valued most, in
1938 from St. Andrews, where he had a splendid time and
played the only round of golf of his life on the Old Course.
Given the choice of degrees, he chose a doctor of (both)
laws since he had studied neither. Doctors of science followed from Princeton in 1957 and Brown in 1971. He was a
member of the Royal Danish Academy, Royal Belgian Academy, Austrian Academy, British Academy, Irish Academy,
American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts
and Sciences (resigned 1959), National Academy of Sciences (elected 1977), Acadmie des Inscriptions et Belleslettres, and other learned and professional societies. He
received the American Council of Learned Societies Award

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

23

for Outstanding American University Professors in 1961,

the Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics of the
Mathematical Association of America for his founding and
editing of Zbl and MR in 1979, the American Philosophical
Societys highest award, the Franklin Medal, in 1987, and
in the same year Brown Universitys highest award, the Susan Culver Rosenberger Medal of Honor. For various publications he received the John F. Lewis Prize of the American
Philosophical Society in 1952 for The Babylonian Method
for the Computations of the Last Visibilities of Mercury,
the Heineman Prize in 1953 for The Exact Sciences, the Pfizer
Prize of the History of Science Society in 1975 for HAMA,
and a second Pfizer Prize in 1985. In 1986 he received the
Balzan Prize of 250,000 Swiss francs, which he donated to
the Institute for Advanced Study.
A bibliography of Neugebauers nearly 300 publications
through his eightieth year by J. Sachs and G. J. Toomer,
with his assistance, was published in Centaurus (22[1979]:25780). The number of additions since then is not small. A
more extended memoir of his life and work, upon which
this memoir is based, may be found in the Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society (137[1993]:139-65), and a shorter
version similar to this one in the Journal for the Histor y of
Astronomy (24[1993]:289-99). I am very grateful to Asger
Aaboe, Edward Kennedy, Edith Kirsch, David Pingree, Janet
Sachs, and Gerald Toomer for information and many helpful comments.

24

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
1926
Die Grundlagen der gyptischen Bruchrechnung. Berlin: Springer.
1927
Zur Enstehung des Sexagesimalsystems. Abhand. d. Gesel. d. Wiss. z.
Gttingen. Math.-Phys. Kl. N.F. 13, 1.
1931
Arithmetik und Rechentechnik der gypter. Quellen und Studien zur
Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik B 1:301-80.
1933
Apollonius-Studien (Studien zur Geschichte der Antiken Algebra
II). Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie
und Physik B 2:215-54.
1934
Vorlesungen ber Geschichte der antiken mathematischen Wissenschaften. I:
Vorgriechische Mathematik. Berlin: Springer.
1935-37
Mathematische Keilschrift-Texte. I-III. Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte
der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik A 3. Reprinted, Berlin:
Springer, 1973.
1938
Untersuchungen zur antiken Astronomie. II-III. Quellen und Studien
zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik B 4:34-91,
193-346.
1945
With A. Sachs. Mathematical Cuneiform Texts. New Haven: American
Oriental Society Series 29.

OTTO E. NEUGEBAUER

25

1949
The astronomy of Maimonides and its sources. Hebr. Un. Coll. Annu.
22:321-63. Reprinted in Astronomy and History, pp. 381-424.
1951
The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. Copenhagen. 2nd ed. Providence:
Brown University Press, 1957. Reprinted, New York: Harper, 1962;
New York: Dover, 1969.
1954
Babylonian planetary theory. Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. 8:60-89.
1955
Astronomical Cuneiform Texts. London: Lund Humphries for the Institute for Advanced Study.
1957
Saros and lunar velocity in Babylonian astronomy. D. Kgl. Danske
Videns. Selsk. Mat.-fys. Medd. 31,4.
1958
The astronomical tables P. Lond. 1278. Osiris 13:93-112.
1959
With H. B. Van Hoesen. Greek horoscopes. Memoirs no. 48. Philadephia:
American Philosophical Society.
1960
Studies in Byzantine astronomical terminology. Trans. Am. Philos. Soc.
N.S. 50:3-45.
1960-64-69
With R. A. Parker. Egyptian Astronomical Texts. I-III. 4 vols. Providence: Brown University Press.
1962
The Astronomical Tables of Al-Khw arizm i . D. Kgl. Danske Videns.
Selsk. Hist.-fil. Skr. 4,2.

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BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

1967-69
With A. Sachs. Some atypical astronomical cuneiform texts. I-II. J.
Cuneif. Stud. 21:183-218; 22: 92-113.
1970-71
With D. Pingree. The Pacasiddh antik a of Var a hamah i ra. 2 vols.
D. Kgl. Videns. Selsk. Hist.-fil. Skr. 6,1.
1975
A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy. 3 vols. Berlin: Springer.
1979
Ethiopic astronomy and computus. Sitz. d. st. Akad. d. Wiss. Philhist. Kl. 347.
1983
Astronomy and History. Selected Essays. New York: Springer.
1984
With N. M. Swerdlow. Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicuss De
Revolutionibus. New York: Springer.
1988
Abu Shakers Chronography. Sitz. d. st. Akad. d. Wiss. Phil-hist. Kl.
498.