The sexagesimal place-value notation and abstract numbers in mathematical cuneiform texts (Q2145714)

Historians of Mesopotamian mathematics have always had difficulties with the sexagesimal place-value notation (SPVN), mostly due to the fact that it does not behave the way modern historians expect numbers to behave. Instead, it is a floating-point system where a given string of digits provides no indication of scale, that is, where the unit element is. Compounding the problem is that, at least in the Old Babylonian period, the SPVN was used almost exclusively as a computational tool. Problems were stated, and answers written, in appropriate metrological units (often using different quantity notation) with intermediate calculations performed in the SPVN. In this paper, the author retrieves a little-noticed episode from the early days of the translation of Mesopotamian mathematics. The two great pioneers were Otto Neugebauer and François Thureau-Dangin. Both transliterated SPVN without indication of absolute size, but they differed in their translations. In the early 1930s, Thureau-Dangin maintained the floating-point nature in his translations, while the mathematically-trained Neugebauer imposed an absolute size. Sadly, Thureau-Dangin's approach had little impact on others, and by the late 1930s, he himself had introduced absolute scale into his translations, with a notation based on degrees, minutes, and seconds. Introducing absolute size into the translations has the advantage of making the problems more comprehensible to the modern reader, at the price of changing the meaning. For a long time, this near-universal practice obscured the fact that the SPVN was used primarily for multiplication. It is only addition that requires a sense of scale, and that did not appear in elementary education. The author explains the historical period, compares it with current practice, now based on a vastly larger corpus of texts than was available in the 1930s, and discusses the standard division of numbers into abstract and concrete. The problem here is that both `abstract' and `concrete' have multiple meanings and different authors have deployed them in different ways. The author has cast an interesting light on a particular case of a recurring theme in the history of mathematics: modernizing translations can impose barriers to understanding the practices of ancient mathematicians.