SOURCE: "The Survival of Babylonian Methods in the Exact Sciences of Antiquity and Middle Ages," in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 107, No. 6, December, 1963, pp. 528-35.

In the following essay, Neugebauer examines the influence of Babylonian mathematical methods on the development of Greek mathematics. Neugebauer states that while a large part of the information in Euclid's Elements had been known for more than a millennium, "mathematics in a modern sense" began with Euclid's addition of general mathematical proof.

Among the many parallels between our own times and the Roman imperial period could be mentioned the readiness to ascribe to the "Chaldeans" discoveries whenever their actual origin was no longer known. The basis for such assignments is usually the same: ignorance of the original cuneiform sources, excusable in antiquity but less so in modern times. Given this situation, it seems to me equally important to establish what we...