Christine Proust facts for kids

Christine Proust (born in 1953) is a French expert who studies the history of mathematics. She is also an Assyriologist, meaning she studies ancient Mesopotamia. She is famous for her work on mathematics from ancient Babylonia.

She works as a top researcher at a group called SPHERE. This group is part of the CNRS and Paris Diderot University. She helps lead a project called SAW (Mathematical Sciences in the Ancient World). This project looks at how math was done in ancient times all over the world. Other experts in the project study math from ancient India and China.

Her Journey to Studying Ancient Math

Christine Proust first worked as a high school math teacher for 20 years. In 1992, she passed a special exam in Mathematics called an agrégation.

After teaching, she decided to study something new. She went to Paris Diderot University. There, she learned about the history of science. She earned her first advanced degree in 1999 and her doctorate in 2004. A doctorate is the highest university degree you can get.

In 2010, she completed another advanced degree called a habilitation. The next year, in 2011, she became a director of research at the SPHERE lab.

Visiting Other Research Places

Christine Proust has also visited many famous research centers:

• In 2009, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA.
• In 2010, she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
• From 2010 to 2011, she was a resident at a research institute in Marseille, France.

Uncovering Ancient Babylonian Math

Christine Proust's main work involves studying old clay tablets from Babylonia. These tablets have ancient math problems and solutions written on them.

Tablets from Nippur

For her doctorate, she studied two large groups of mathematical tablets. These tablets were found in a very old city called Nippur. They were dug up by archaeologists in the late 1800s.

Her research led to two important books:

• Tablettes mathématiques de Nippur (Mathematical Tablets from Nippur)
• Tablettes mathématiques de la collection Hilprecht (Mathematical Tablets from the Hilprecht Collection)

The first book is about tablets kept in a museum in Istanbul, Turkey. It helped her understand how students learned math in ancient Nippur. The second book is about tablets at the University of Jena in Germany.

How Ancient Students Learned Math

Christine Proust's work showed us in great detail how math was taught in Old Babylonian Nippur. She figured out:

• What subjects were taught.
• How long it took to learn them.
• How learning the Sumerian language was connected to learning math. (Sumerian was a foreign language to the people of Babylonia).
• How they used different ways of counting, like measuring things and using a special number system based on 60.

Exhibits and Other Research

She also helped create an exhibit called Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics. This show took place in New York from 2010 to 2011. It displayed important clay tablets, like YBC 7289 and Plimpton 322. These tablets show amazing ancient math.

Proust has also studied the notes and letters of Otto Neugebauer. He was a famous historian who started the study of ancient math texts written on clay tablets in the mid-1900s. Some of his materials were also shown at the New York exhibit.

Books She Has Written or Edited

Christine Proust has written her own books and helped edit others.

Her Own Books

• Tablettes mathématiques de Nippur (2007)
• Tablettes mathématiques de la collection Hilprecht (2008)

Books She Has Edited

• Scientific Sources and Teaching Contexts Throughout History: Problems and Perspectives (2014, with Alain Bernard)
• A Mathematician's Journeys: Otto Neugebauer and Modern Transformations of Ancient Science (2016, with Alexander Jones and John Steele)
• Scholars and Scholarship in Late Babylonian Uruk (2019, with John Steele)

Awards and Recognition

Christine Proust has received several important awards for her work:

• In 2011, she won the Prix Paul Doistau-Émile Blutet. This award is given by the French Academy of Sciences. She received it for all her research, especially for publishing the Nippur tablets.
• In 2019, she became a member of the International Academy of the History of Science.
• On July 26, 2021, she received one of the two Kenneth O. May Prize medals. This award is given by the International Commission on the History of Mathematics.