16
WINTER 2013 | ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE
The
first “Last Lecture”
is given by the
Owen D. Young Outstanding Faculty
Award winner to the graduating class
during its final week on campus.
100
th
Night
,
a student-led tradition that
takes place 100 nights before the se-
nior class graduates, is started.
2001
9.11
2001
Terrorist attacks in U.S.
kill nearly 3,000, including
five Laurentians.
2002
Inaugural First-Year
Convocation
takes place;
Homecoming Weekend is
reintroduced.
2011
LAURENTIAN PORTRAIT
MESOPOTAMI AN
MATHEMAT I C I AN
by Molly Lunn ’12
When Duncan Melville was asked
to teach History of Mathematics, he
realized he could use a history brush-
up himself. “I started at the beginning
and didn’t get very far—I got stuck
somewhere around 4,000 years ago,”
says the Martha E. '62 and Gregg
E. Peterson Professor of Mathematics.
Melville had discovered his pas-
sion for Mesopotamian mathematics.
“
You can trace the development of
mathematics in Mesopotamia from
the very beginning in a way you can’t
with any other culture,” Melville says
of his study of symbols carved with
reeds into cuneiform tablets. The small
clay slabs are found throughout what
is now Iraq; piles of discarded tablets
were popular in building now-ancient
foundations.
“
The archeological context (of the
tablets) is very important to their
meaning,” Melville says, but the po-
litical realities of modern Iraq further
complicate the discovery of the few
thousand tablets relating to mathemat-
ics that are known to exist.
Melville splits his sabbaticals between
the Yale Babylonian Collection of
tablets and the British Museum in
London, where he studies in “a great
arching room of silent scholars with
drawers of tablets lining the walls.” He
is also one of a “queue of professors”
asking to lead St. Lawrence's
London semester, a program in which
he became especially interested after
his son James Melville ’12 returned
from London.
Melville feels strongly that “more
mathematics students should be
exposed to the history of the sub-
ject, especially those hoping to teach
grades K-12.” He believes connecting
a historical context to the math taught
in schools today will make the subject
more interesting and accessible. “I can’t
fit a lot of Mesopotamian math into
the few weeks of a semester,” Melville
says of the course he continues to
teach, but he feels confident that what
he can share will help future teachers
become better educators themselves.
A writing intern in University
Communications in fall 2012,
government major Molly Lunn also
contributed the “Final Thought”
essay on the inside back cover of
this magazine.
DUNCAN MELVILLE