The institute, part of New York University, has gathered together a remarkable selection of Old Babylonian tablets from the collections of three universities — Columbia, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania — that cover a wide mathematical range. Made between 1900 and 1700 B.C., they include student exercises, word problems and calculation tables, as well as more abstract demonstrations. Under the curatorship of Alexander Jones, a professor at N.Y.U., and Christine Proust, a historian of mathematics, the tablets are used to give a quick survey of Babylonian mathematical enterprise, while also paying tribute to Neugebauer, the Austrian-born scholar who spent the last half of his career teaching at Brown University and almost single-handedly created a new discipline of study through his analysis of these neglected sources.

Only about 950 mathematically oriented tablets survived two millenniums of Babylonian history, and since their discovery, debate has raged over what they show us about that lost world. Every major history of Western mathematics written during the last 70 years has at least started to take Babylonians into account. Generally, their systems have been seen as precursors to the theoretical flowering of Greek mathematics, out of which our own mathematical approaches have grown.

But Neugebauer, and then his many students and rivals, also showed how sophisticated Babylonian mathematics was and how many similarities existed to later Western systems — if, that is, you counted using 60 fingers (as we often seem to, thanks to the Babylonians, when dealing with seconds and minutes and, in part, even when measuring angles).

Examining the surviving tablets, including one multiplication table on display here, scholars decoded the bird’s feet of Babylonian numerals, showing that the Babylonians, like us, used the same symbol to represent different numerical values. (The same digit for us has a different value if it is in the 1’s column, the 10’s column, or the 100’s column; the Babylonians could use the same sign, depending on context, to represent a 1 or a 60 or a 3,600.)