To the Editor:
The article yesterday on Brown's no-longer-existing history of math department was excellent ("Extinct mathematics dept. leaves traces around U.," Oct. 31). Both Otto Neugebauer and David Pingree were truly outstanding scholars, not only in the history of ancient Babylonian and Hindu math and astronomy, but also in the general culture of those civilizations. Neugebauer deciphered Babylonian clay tablets and discovered a very rich mathematical culture worthy of comparison with that of the Greeks. I recall a lecture in which he explained how the Egyptian Coptic Christian Church calendar made sure that Easter and Passover never coincided. Pingree made frequent trips to India to collect Hindu manuscripts, some in some Rajah's private library and written on Banana tree leaves. He discovered that Hindu mathematicians and astronomers, several hundred years before Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus, knew the Taylor series of the sine and cosine functions. Any modern person who has learned this result in a calculus course finds it impossible to imagine how they did it. However Kim Plofker PhD'95 has recently written a large work on Hindu astronomy, in which, incidentally, this is explained. This book is reviewed by Brown's Professor Emeritus David Mumford, himself one of the world's most eminent mathematicians who is himself currently working on ancient Chinese astronomy. In a university that emphasizes liberal education and the unity of knowledge, the outstanding work of these true scholars should have been better appreciated in recent times, and their department should not have been abolished.
Bruno Harris Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
