Peter Damerow

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Peter Damerow (born December 20, 1939 in Berlin ; † November 20, 2011 there ) was a German historian of science who also dealt with ancient oriental studies and cognitive psychology.

Live and act

Damerow studied mathematics at the Free University of Berlin (where he was chairman of the AStA in 1965 with Wolfgang Lefèvre ) and received his doctorate in 1977 at Bielefeld University (reform of the curriculum for mathematics teaching in secondary level I in the Federal Republic of Germany 1963–1974). In the 1980s he was at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and dealt with cognitive psychology, in particular the development of the number concept. In 1994 he completed his habilitation at the University of Konstanz . Since 1997 he has been a permanent research fellow (Research Scholar) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Among other things, he dealt with the development of early mathematics (arithmetic) and writing in Babylonia (as well as cuneiform texts on structural engineering) and the development of mechanics in the early modern period. He was involved in the project of digitizing cuneiform texts, which is headed by Hans J. Nissen from the Free University of Berlin. He was particularly interested in texts from Uruk and was significantly involved in the 3D digitization of clay tablets in the Hilprecht collection .

Peter Damerow died of cancer on November 20, 2011 in his house in Berlin-Lichterfelde .

In 2013, his former colleagues Manfred D. Laubichler, Jane Maienschein and Jürgen Renn dedicated the article Computational Perspectives in the History of Science: To the Memory of Peter Damerow , which was published in Isis magazine . In a footnote they note that Damerow was a pioneer in adopting new perspectives and methods in the history of science and one of the earliest proponents of numerical (computational) approaches and Open Access .

Fonts

  • with Wolfgang Lefevre Rechenstein, Experiment, Sprache , Klett-Cotta 1981
  • Abstraction and Representation: Essays on the cultural evolution of thinking , Kluwer 1995
  • Editor with Jens Høyrup : Changing views on ancient near eastern mathematics , Berlin contributions to the Middle East, Vol. 19, Dietrich Reimer 2001 (from a corresponding seminar at the Free University of Berlin since 1983)
  • with Hans J. Nissen, Robert K. Englund: Information processing 5000 years ago: early writing and techniques of economic administration in the ancient Near East ; Hildesheim, Franzbecker 2004 (first edition 1991, ISBN 3-88120-110-6 )
  • with Nissen, Englund Archaic bookkeeping: writing and techniques of economic administration in the ancient near east , University of Chicago Press 1993
  • with Robert K. Englund The Proto-Elamite Texts from Tepe Yahya , Cambridge, Mass., 1989
  • with Gideon Freudenthal, Jürgen Renn , Peter McLaughlin: Exploring the limits of preclassical mechanics: a study of conceptual development in early modern science; free fall and compounded motion in the work of Descartes, Galileo, and Beeckman , Springer, 2004
  • The role of the tool in the training of mechanics as a science , in Renate Wahsner (editor) Hegel and the mechanistic worldview , Frankfurt a. M. 2005
  • "The material culture of calculation: a theoretical framework for a historical epistemology of the concept of number." In: Uwe Gellert, Eva Jablonka (editor) Mathematisation and demathematisation: social, philosophical and educational ramifications , Rotterdam, Sense Publ., 2006 publ. 2007.
  • Jürgen Renn, Matthias Schemmel (ed.): Culture and cognition: essays in honor of Peter Damerow , Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 2019, ISBN 978-3-945561-33-1 (Festschrift for Damerow), series Max Planck research library for the history and development of knowledge / Proceedings; 11. Page about the book, online version (Open Access)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary notice for Peter Damerow, in the Tagesspiegel
  2. ^ Portrait of Peter Damerow at the Max Planck Society
  3. ↑ Article about Peter Damerow in Science News Daily
  4. ↑ 3D scans of cuneiform tablets - a workshop report by Jörg Kantel
  5. ↑ Portrait of Peter Damerow at Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative ( Memento from 7 July 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  6. ↑ see Manfred D. Laubichler, Jane Maienschein, Jürgen Renn: Computational Perspectives in the History of Science: To the Memory of Peter Damerow , in: Isis, 2013, 104: 119–130 , freely accessible via Jstor
personal data
SURNAME Damerow, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German science historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 2011
Place of death Berlin