"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

astronomy.
*When I was a young professor at Cornell, Professor Neugebauer had come one year to
give a sequence of lectures, called the Messenger Lectures, on Babylonian mathematics. They
were wonderful. Oppenheimer lectured the next year. I remember thinking to myself, "Wouldn't it
be nice to come, someday, and be able to give lectures like that!" Some years later, when I was
refusing invitations to lecture at various places, I was invited to give the Messenger Lectures at
Cornell. Of course I couldn't refuse, because I had put that in my mind so I accepted an invitation
to go over to Bob Wilson's house for a weekend and we discussed various ideas. The result was
a series of lectures called "The Character of Physical Law."
"Yes," he said. "I do. He's not a professional anthropologist or a historian; he's an
amateur. But he certainly knows a lot about it. His name is Richard Feynman."
She nearly died! She's trying to bring some culture to the physicists, and the only
way to do it is to get a physicist!
The only reason I knew anything about Mayan mathematics was that I was getting
exhausted on my honeymoon in Mexico with my second wife, Mary Lou. She was
greatly interested in art history, particularly that of Mexico. So we went to Mexico for
our honeymoon and we climbed up pyramids and down pyramids; she had me following
her all over the place. She showed me many interesting things, such as certain
relationships in the designs of various figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going
up and down in hot and steamy jungles, I was exhausted.
In some little Guatemalan town in the middle of nowhere we went into a museum
that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols, pictures, and bars and
dots. It was a copy (made by a man named Villacorta) of the Dresden Codex, an original
book made by the Mayans found in a museum in Dresden. I knew the bars and dots were
numbers. My father had taken me to the New York World's Fair when I was a little kid,
and there they had reconstructed a Mayan temple. I remembered him telling me how the
Mayans had invented the zero and had done many interesting things.
The museum had copies of the codex for sale, so I bought one. On each page at
the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and partial translation in
Spanish.
I love puzzles and codes, so when I saw the bars and dots, I thought, "I'm gonna
have some fun!" I covered up the Spanish with a piece of yellow paper and began playing
this game of deciphering the Mayan bars and dots, sitting in the hotel room, while my
wife climbed up and down the pyramids all day.
I quickly figured out that a bar was equal to five dots, what the symbol for zero
was, and so on. It took me a little longer to figure out that the bars and dots always
carried at twenty the first time, but they carried at eighteen the second time (making
cycles of 360). I also worked out all kinds of things about various faces: they had surely
meant certain days and weeks.
After we got back home I continued to work on it. Altogether, it's a lot of fun to
try to decipher something like that, because when you start out you don't know anything ­
­ you have no clue to go by. But then you notice certain numbers that appear often, and
add up to other numbers, and so on.
There was one place in the codex where the number 584 was very prominent.
This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. Another prominent number was
2920, or 584 x 5 (also 365 x 8). There was a table of multiples of 2920 up to 13 x 2920,