Abraham Sachs

Abraham Joseph Sachs ( born December 11, 1914 in Baltimore, † 22 April 1983 in Providence, Rhode Iceland ) was an American historian of mathematics and Assyriologist.

Life and work

Sachs in 1939 received his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and then worked for several years as a scientist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where he worked on a assyriological Dictionary (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary). In 1941, he was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow Assistant Professor at Brown University, where he close associate of Otto Neugebauer was and engaged in Babylonian astronomical and mathematical cuneiform texts ( he was, among other things partly by him in the British Museum discovered astronomical observation texts and Gadex texts out ). 1945/46, he was in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1946 he was one of the founding members of the Department of History of Mathematics at Brown University, where he became in 1954 professor of mathematics history.

Writings

• Otto Neugebauer: Mathematical Cuneiform Texts. In 1955.
• With Hermann Hunger: Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylon. 3 volumes, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 1988, 1989, 1996.