Otto Neugebauer: Reminiscences and Appreciation

Abstract

I first met Otto Neugebauer in the fall of 1963 when I joined the faculty of Brown University. For many years prior to his return to the Institute for Advanced Studies in the mid '80s, I ate lunch with him fairly regularly in the Brown cafeteria known as the Ivy Room. We were not infrequently joined by other members of the History of Mathematics Department or their visitors. The conversation was relaxed but lively, often very general, and was terminated promptly when the last person had finished lunch. Neugebauer was not one to twiddle his spoon leisurely in a second cup of coffee. He had that soft outward appearance and low-decibel manner that I associate with Austrians. Inwardly, he held firm opinions and prejudices, and would occasionally burst out in anger and irritation. Not unlike Mark Twain, he perceived the human world as consisting largely of fools, knaves, and dupes; and when he was overwhelmed by this perception, he took refuge in his love of animals which was tender and deep. He had his roster of The Greats in his profession, and though his ratings were not as finely tuned as those of G. H. Hardy, anyone who ate lunch with him would find out after a week which of the great names were really great and which were asses. As regards the past, he thought that Copernicus was overrated-he called him Koppernickel. Kepler was much better, and he loved Arthur Koestler's popularization of Kepler in The Sleepwalkers. Ptolemy was a great hero. As regards contemporaries, he expressed his views candidly. He could not abide philosophy; he thought it a great waste of time and rarely discussed it. I would guess, though, that his largely unspoken philosophy of science was that of the logical positivism promulgated by the Vienna Circle in the 1920s. He parodied Hegel. He could not abide religious ritual or theological dogmas, and though he was a considerable student of these matters, he parodied them all mercilessly. As a relaxation, he read the Lives of the Ethiopic Saints, and made a dossier of the individual Devils those fellows had to contend with. He was given to playful irony and loved Anatole France's ironic fantasies. I recall his being greatly amused by this: he said he found in some ancient Near Eastern medical text that crocodile droppings were prescribed for such and such a medical condition. The patient applied it without success and went back to the practitioner with a complaint. The practitioner asked What was the sex of the crocodile? A male, I think. Then try with a female. To this story, Neugebauer commented with a twinkle in his eye, You see, the ancients knew all about hormones!