Research taste in history: the importance of learning Babylonian math

The essay argues that historical research depends on intellectual curiosity and “research taste”: the ability to pursue unexpected questions and recognize promise in ideas that have no immediate practical payoff. AI systems can support memorization, tailored instruction, and routine archival work, but their tendency toward average, familiar perspectives may make them poor guides to open-ended humanistic inquiry. As algorithms increasingly shape research, historians need to resist this narrowing by engaging seriously with unfamiliar ways of thinking rather than defaulting to modern assumptions.

The argument grows from the writer’s memories of Allan Chapman, an eccentric Oxford historian of science who taught him to work with Sumerian-Babylonian astronomy and mathematics, including the base-60 number system. The exercises initially seemed pointless, but they demonstrated how understanding alien knowledge systems can change how one thinks. Studying mistaken or obsolete theories - such as phlogiston or Tycho Brahe’s model of the cosmos - reveals the reasoning and alternatives that shaped scientific history, not merely a march toward correct discoveries. Chapman’s wide-ranging interests, from Robert Hooke and medieval clocks to Islamic automata, exemplified curiosity without contrarianism. His teaching showed that inhabiting past worldviews, rather than merely knowing they existed, is essential to interpreting history and cultivating original research.