Overview
- Offers an approach to the diversity of scientific cultures based on case studies dealing with mathematical sources
- Links the history of mathematics to the history of ancient worlds
- Sheds a new light on the history of place-value systems
Part of the book series: Why the Sciences of the Ancient World Matter (WSAWM, volume 6)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (13 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Shaping Quantities and Relating them to Numbers
-
Front Matter
-
-
Interpreting Numbers and Quantities in Texts
-
Front Matter
-
-
Working with Operations and Algorithms
-
Front Matter
-
-
Different Cultures of Computation and Quantification
-
Front Matter
-
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
The various chapters focus on the different ways and contexts of shaping numbers and quantities, and on the procedures applied to them. The book places special emphasis on the processes of emergence of place-value number systems, evidenced in the three geographical areas under study All these features yield essential elements that will enable historians of mathematics to further capture the diversity of computation practices in their contexts, whereas previous historical approaches have tended to emphasize elements that displayed uniformity within “civilizational” blocks. The book includes editions and translations of texts, some of them published here for the first time, maps, and conventions for editions of ancient texts. It thereby offers primary sources and methodological tools for teaching and learning.
The volume is aimed at historians and philosophers of science and mathematics, historians of the ancient worlds, historians of economics, sinologists, indologists, assyriologists, as well as undergraduate, graduate students and teachers in mathematics, the history and philosophy of science and mathematics, and in the history of ancient worlds.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Agathe Keller is Senior Researcher with the CNRS and Member of the SPHERE lab in Paris. She works on medieval Sanskrit mathematical commentaries (5th-12th centuries) and on the historiography of mathematics in and on India from the 19th century until today. She has published Expounding the mathematical Seed, Bhāskara’s commentary on the mathematical chapter of the Āryabhaṭīya(Birkhaüser, 2006).
Christine Proust is Senior Researcher Emerita at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris). She works on the history of mathematics in the Ancient Near East, more specifically on mathematical cuneiform texts from different periods, including the end of the third millennium BCE, the Old Babylonian period (early second millennium), and Late Babylonian periods (last centuries of the first millennium BCE).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Cultures of Computation and Quantification in the Ancient World
Book Subtitle: Numbers, Measurements, and Operations in Documents from Mesopotamia, China and South Asia
Editors: Karine Chemla, Agathe Keller, Christine Proust
Series Title: Why the Sciences of the Ancient World Matter
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98361-1
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-98360-4Published: 02 January 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-98363-5Published: 03 January 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-98361-1Published: 01 January 2023
Series ISSN: 2662-9933
Series E-ISSN: 2662-9941
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 765
Number of Illustrations: 284 b/w illustrations, 48 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Science, Epistemology, History of Mathematical Sciences, Asian History, History of South Asia