Maya mathematician’s name decoded alongside astronomical formula
Article excerpt
Hieroglyphs on the wall of a Maya building record calculations concerning the orbits of Earth, Mars and Venus, as well as the name of a mathematician who wrote the text around 1200 years ago
The Maya solar calendar is made up of 19 months
zimmytws/Getty Images
An ancient Maya astronomer-mathematician has been identified for the first time along with his complex calculations made around 1200 years ago, predicting the orbital cycles of Mars and Venus.
“This is the first direct mention of an ancestral Maya astronomer-mathematician by personal name,” says Franco Rossi at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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It is also the oldest recorded name of an astronomer-mathematician ever known from anywhere in the Americas, he says.
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The Maya civilisation flourished in Central America between roughly 2000 BC and AD 1697. They had advanced knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, but much of it was lost after the mass burning of their books by Spanish missionaries.
Since 2010, excavations at the site of Xultun, Guatemala, have revealed astronomical and mathematical inscriptions inside a small masonry building.
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On the east and north-east wall of the building are around 50 texts that scientists believe are “rough drafts” made by Maya mathematicians as they charted and predicted the cycles of celestial objects relative to Earth and to one another.
Rossi and his colleagues have painstakingly deciphered one of these murals, named Text 19. At the bottom of the mural is the name of Sak Tahn Waax, which translates to White-chested Fox, who is believed the be the author of the formula.
The mathematical formula inscribed on a wall at the Maya site of Xultun, Guatemala
F.D. Rossi; H. Hurst
Text 19 consists of 11 hieroglyphs, which had to be scanned, photographed and magnified under different illumination angles, and compared to other, later, astronomical-mathematical writings, before their meaning could be deduced.
While similar mathematical and astronomical expertise is found across Maya cities, the mention of Sak Tahn Waax, who the researchers believe was probably male, is unique.
“Whether this is an instance of the scribe himself signing his own calculation or attributing the intellectual work to another, we have a formula and the name of its creator, which serves to demonstrate the importance of this kind of intellectual contribution for Classic Maya people,” says Rossi.
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The calendar system on display in Text 19 uses maths in relation to time periods, he says. These time periods were drawn from a 260-day calendar, a 365-day solar calendar, a 584-day approximation of Venus’s synodic cycle (when the planet returns to the same position relative to both Earth and the sun) and a 780-day approximation of Mars’s synodic cycle. The total length of the formula is five Venus synodic cycles or 2920 days, and the date that Text 19 most likely refers to is 7 November of AD 781 in the Julian calendar.
Exactly how this formula would have been applied is unknown, says Rossi, as it “isn’t incorporated into any larger body of work”.
“We think it is meant to concisely and meaningfully show the relationship between these two planets and human counts of time in ways that could then be applied to political ceremony, predictive astronomy and understandings of seasonality,” he says.
Such meticulous mathematical legwork would have been critical to structuring life in a world before computers, smartphones and weather apps, says Rossi.
Journal Reference:
Antiquity
DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2026.10378