
Cultures of Computation and Quantification in the Ancient World
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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.
Reviews / Votes
"The volume is a success. . The editors are to be commended for having attracted a wide range of authors in terms of national and gender diversity, also not always present in this field. Cultures of Computation and Quantification in the Ancient World will be of considerable use to specialists not only in the three geographical areas of focus, but also to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of premodern mathematics in all regions and traditions." (Stephen Chrisomalis, Historia Mathematica, August 18, 2025)
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Agathe Keller is Senior Researcher with the CNRS and Member of the SPHERE lab in Paris. She works on medieval Sanskrit mathematical commentaries (5 th -12 th centuries) and on the historiography of mathematics in and on India from the 19 th century until today. She has published Expounding the mathematical Seed, Bhaskara's commentary on the mathematical chapter of the Aryabha ?iya (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).
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