Ronin Public Seminar: Modern Methods of Chaos and Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy

Title: Modern Methods of Chaos and Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy. Host: Tom Buckholtz Presenter: Immanuel Freedman ABSTRACT: Babylonian mathematical astronomy appears founded on an understanding of repeated procedures – a technology utilized by modern methods of nonlinear dynamics capable of describing deterministic chaos. The repeated procedures (known as iterated maps because they repeatedly provide a mathematical mapping from a current value to a next value) appear to model visibility phenomena such as first or last appearance using Poincaré sections describing close recurrence in position among the stars in terms of sidereal ecliptic longitude. Babylonian astronomers were careful to define stable one‐dimensional periodic iterated maps addressed by terminating sexagesimal fractions and partitioned according to resonances, which strongly suggests at least empirical knowledge from music of the entrainment of nonlinear oscillators termed mode‐locking for which the si