Lady Ranelagh: the incomparable life of Robert Boyle’s sister

Abstract

lative level of Netz’s book be read as a stimulating invitation. I shall, however, make two minor corrections. Firstly, in order to avoid restarting an ancient academic war: Jacques Sesiano did not discover the Arabic Diophantos, and never claimed to have done so (pp. 396f ). Sesiano explains instead that ‘in 1973, my thesis adviser, Gerald Toomer, learned of the existence of this manuscript in A. Gulchin-i Maānī’s just-published catalogue of the mathematical manuscripts in the Mashhad Shrine Library, and secured a photographic copy of it’. Secondly, in order to avoid a false reconstruction of my own itinerary: My interpretation of Old Babylonian mathematical texts ‘strictly as a historian of mathematics’ did not precede their being put into the context of school and state administration (p. 25). That contextualization was actually my Mesopotamian starting point around 1975 (when I still believed in the Neugebauer–Thureau-Dangin interpretation), with the outcome first partially published in 1980. It was only in 1981/82 that a question after a lecture about this sociological topic provoked me to undertake philological work.