Alice Slotsky facts for kids

Alice Louise Slotsky was an American historian who studied the history of mathematics and ancient Mesopotamia. She was especially known for her work on how people in ancient Babylon did math and kept records. She also taught popular classes on the Akkadian language (an ancient language) at Brown University.

Education and Career

Alice Slotsky first went to Bryn Mawr College to study economics. Later, she continued her studies in economics at New York University. In 1959, she married Gordon J. Slotsky.

Many years later, she went back to school at Yale University to study the history of mathematics. She earned her Ph.D. (a high-level university degree) in 1992.

In 1999, Slotsky became a visiting professor at Brown University in the history of mathematics department. She started teaching the Akkadian language there. Her class became very popular, and she taught more students than any other expert in ancient Mesopotamia before her.

However, when the head of her department passed away in 2005, the university closed the department. Alice Slotsky was moved to a temporary job in the classics department, where she taught for two more years. After that, her Akkadian class was removed from that department too.

She passed away on June 13, 2023, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Books

Alice Slotsky's Ph.D. research became a book in 1997 called The Bourse of Babylon: market quotations in the astronomical diaries of Babylonia. This book was about how markets worked in ancient Babylon.

She also wrote another book with Ronald Wallenfels in 2009, titled Tallies and Trends: The Late Babylonian Commodity Price Lists. This book looked at lists of prices for goods in later Babylonian times.

With Sarah C. Melville, she helped edit a book called Opening the Tablet Box: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Benjamin R. Foster in 2010. This book was a collection of studies about the ancient Near East.

Recognition

In 2008, a special book was published to honor Alice Slotsky. It was called From the Banks of the Euphrates: Studies in Honor of Alice Louise Slotsky. This kind of book, with essays from different scholars, is called a festschrift.