Maya mathematician’s name decoded alongside astronomical formula — SkimNews
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- Franco Rossi at MIT and colleagues identified the name Sak Tahn Waax (White-chested Fox) at the bottom of a mural called Text 19, marking what Rossi calls "the first direct mention of an ancestral Maya astronomer-mathematician by personal name" and the oldest recorded name of an astronomer-mathematician from anywhere in the Americas.
- Text 19 spans 11 hieroglyphs and 2,920 days (five Venus synodic cycles), most likely referring to November 7, AD 781 in the Julian calendar, and incorporates a 260-day calendar, a 365-day solar calendar, a 584-day Venus cycle, and a 780-day Mars cycle approximation.
- The mural was discovered among ~50 "rough draft" astronomical and mathematical inscriptions on the east and north-east walls of a small masonry building at the Xultun, Guatemala excavation site, where digs have been running since 2010.
- Deciphering required scanning, photographing, and magnifying the hieroglyphs under different illumination angles and comparing them against later astronomical-mathematical writings, since much of Maya knowledge was lost after Spanish missionaries burned their books.
- Rossi notes the exact application of the formula remains unknown because it "isn't incorporated into any larger body of work," but suggests it was meant to concisely show the relationship between planets and human time counts for political ceremony, predictive astronomy, and understandings of seasonality.
Why it matters: For the first time, researchers have a named individual behind a piece of pre-Columbian scientific work, giving historians a concrete person to study rather than an anonymous tradition and reframing Classic Maya intellectual contributions as attributable to identifiable practitioners rather than faceless scribes.
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