Robson was born in 1969.[3] In 1990,she graduated with a BSc in mathematics from the University of Warwick.[4] In 1995,she received a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree from the University of Oxford for a thesis titled "Old Babylonian coefficient lists and the wider context of mathematics in ancient Mesopotamia 2100-1600 BC".[5]
Career
She was a British Academy postdoctoral research fellow from 1997 to 2000 and then a post-doctoral research fellow at All Souls College from 2000 to 2003,associated with the Faculty of Oriental Studies.[1] From 2004 to 2013 Robson was based at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.[6]
She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.[16]
Books
Old Babylonian Coefficient Lists and the Wider Context of Mathematics in Ancient Mesopotamia,2100–1600 BC (1995),Oxford University.
Mesopotamian Mathematics,2100–1600 BC:Technical Constants in Bureaucracy and Education (1999),Oxford editions of cuneiform texts 14,Oxford University Press, ISBN978-0-19-815246-0. The constants of the title, expressed by the Babylonian word igigubbûm, include mathematical constants such as a numerical approximation of π as well as conversion factors between units.[17] Reviewer Leo Depuydt writes that this book "surveys all that is known about constants in Mesopotamian mathematics and advances our insight into their function".[18]
The Literature of Ancient Sumer (2006, with Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, and Gábor Zólyomi), Oxford University Press, ISBN978-0-19-929633-0. This book contains a selection of texts of Sumerian literature, drawn from the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, an Oxford University project in which Robson is a participant. Unlike an earlier collection of Sumerian literature by Thorkild Jacobsen, the translations included in this collection are literal and in plain prose, even when they translate works of poetry.[21]
Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History (2008), Princeton University Press, ISBN978-0-691-09182-2. This book is aimed at the general public, and explains both the mathematical ideas from the three-millennium-long history of ancient Mesopotamian mathematics and the context from which they arose. It is organized chronologically; two appendices tabulate Mesopotamian systems of measurement and index nearly all known mathematical clay tablets from the region.[23][24][25][26]
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics (2009, edited with Jacqueline A. Stedall), Oxford University Press, ISBN978-0-19-921312-2. The 36 articles in this volume cover a wide range of geography and time. But although, as the title suggests, some of the contents are survey articles, many others are research papers.[27]
↑ Robson, Eleanor (August 2001), "Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Babylon: a reassessment of Plimpton 322", Historia Mathematica, 28 (3): 167–206, doi:10.1006/hmat.2001.2317, MR1849797 p. 202: "the question 'how was the tablet calculated?' does not have to have the same answer as the question 'what problems does the tablet set?' The first can be answered most satisfactorily by reciprocal pairs, as first suggested half a century ago, and the second by some sort of right-triangle problems."
↑ Review by A. R. George (2005), Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland (Third Series) 15: 219–220, doi:10.1017/S1356186305215262.
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