Nick Petrichow

speaker

224 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Nick Petrichow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Nature Podcast · Briefing Chat: Sweet! Elusive sugar molecules found in space · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

So hieroglyphs, you know, the sort of like symbolic writing system that the Mayans and others used.

And this one actually showed a relationship between several different calendars.

So it looked at a 2920-day cycle, which linked five Venus cycles, you know, Venus going around the sun.

Eight solar years and three other Mayan calendars and also Martian years as well.

So it's described by the author as just super nerdy math and they're doing this sort of fun notation that is like a shorthand, so it does kind of seem like showing

Yeah, so this is the first time that a mathematical description has had a name attached to it.

So the person who is taking credit for this, we're not sure if they actually wrote this specific hieroglyph or not, but the person named there is Saktan Wax, which can be translated as the white chested fox.

So this was someone, you know, obviously quite proud of their notations.

But the fact that the name of the writer is there suggests that mathematicians were recognized in the

the Mayan society as much as artists were, so maybe elevating their status somewhat.

And this text, combined with previous discoveries in the Mayan civilization, suggests they had a really advanced grasp of mathematics.

They knew how to do positional notation, advanced arithmetical operations, algebraic relationships, they had an idea of negative numbers and multiplicative factors.

So there's quite a lot of the other

That they could do, which puts them on par with many sort of ancient mathematicians of the likes of Archimedes and that sort of thing.

The only thing that we don't have evidence for the Mayans understanding is geometry.

Because when you look at their notations and things, there's no sign of geometry, even though some geometrical descriptions could give you more accurate dates for things like eclipses and things like that.

So this civilization, who was very interested in calendars, very interested in the country.

Researchers will be looking for more of this.

It also just shows that perhaps the Mayans were a bit isolated because a lot of our modern mathematical systems is a lot of passing back and forth between civilizations.

So the Greeks got geometry from the Egyptians, then the Greeks gave that to the Islamic and the Indian world, and then uh modern day Europe got those mathematical descriptions from them.

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