Eleanor Robson

Eleanor Robson

Eleanor Robson is a Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at the Department of History, University College London, chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Robson is the author or co-author of several books on Mesopotamian culture and the history of mathematics. In 2003, she won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for her work on Plimpton 322, a clay tablet of Babylonian mathematics; contrary to previous theories according to which this tablet represented a table of Pythagorean triples, Robson showed that it could have been a collection of school exercises in solving quadratic equations. She has also been widely quoted for her criticism of the U.S. Government's failure to prevent looting at the National Museum of Iraq during the Iraq War in 2003.

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