Wednesday, April 22, 2015

CafeSci Boston - April 2015 "Why 60 Minutes? 5000 years of tradition and science."

Last night I spoke at CafeSci Boston for the Cambridge Science Festival. I had a great time and the audience was lovely. The title of my talk was "Why 60 Minutes? 5000 years of tradition and science."

Unfortunately official recordings don't start until next month, but my wife managed decent capture herself:

You can follow CafeSci Boston on Twitter at @CafeSciBoston

An earlier article version of this talk can be found at:
http://www.livescience.com/44964-why-60-minutes-in-an-hour.html

The talk is based on a passing mention in the following book:

Page 4:
Several centuries of continuous [Mesopotamian] observations provided an invaluable body of data for the computation of planetary periods… As it would have been an overwhelming task to convert all these data into the decimal system… the Greeks maintained the sexagesimal system for astronomical measurements… This was also adopted by the Indians as early as antiquity… Then… it reached the Muslims who in turn transmitted this notation to medieval Christian Europe. The sexagesimal division… still used today is thus a living witness to the sexagesimal base once used by the Sumerians… in prehistoric times.

Here's some books that helped me stitch the narrative together:

And more generally about the history of mathematics:

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