Otto Neugebauer and Richard Courant: on exporting the Göttingen approach to the history of mathematics (Q444047)

The well-documented text raises a variety of questions of the historiography of Babylonian and Greek mathematics exemplified by the work and biography of the probably most influential historian of mathematics of the 20th century, Otto Neugebauer. The paper describes Neugebauer's peculiar `non-philosophical' approach to the history of mathematics and some of the biographical circumstances which stimulated this approach. Among the latter were Neugebauer's close affinity to mathematics itself and to research mathematicians, in particular Richard Courant, as well as political events. Nazi dictatorship in Germany drove him from his position as an editor of Zentralblatt through Copenhagen into American exile and led to his foundation of the competing Mathematical Reviews in 1940. Some new archival material from Neugebauer's Nachlass at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study are added, which testify for instance to his early familiarity (in Austrian Graz around 1920) with Einstein's general theory of relativity. It should be added that the first edition of \textit{O. Neugebauer}'s [The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press (1952; Zbl 0049.00201)] was published in Copenhagen, once the first step on his flight from Germany 1934-1939.