Since October 2010 Elisabeth Rinner has been a research assistant at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Besides her teaching activities, she is working on the history of geography and cartography in antiquity, especially on the Geographike hyphegesis of K. Ptolemy. Comparing the Ptolemaic locations of places with their modern values makes it possible to find characteristic differences between both datasets, which result from the process of the genesis of Ptolemy´s geographic coordinates. This opens up a new way to identify methods and sources Ptolemy used to generate the values for longitude and latitude for the set of more than 6000 places given in his Geography.

Hagan Brunke is mathematician, physicist, and assyriologist.  From 2008 to 2010, he was member of the TOPOI research group D-III-2 The Epistemological Dynamics of Early Writing: Spatiality and Perception. At present, his main research interests are Sumerian economy, especially of the Ur III period, and Babylonian mathematics.

Since 2005 Eberhard Knobloch has served as president of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences (Paris), and since 2002, as academy professor of history of science and technology at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and at the Technical University of Berlin (since 2009 em.). Being one of Topoi’s principal investigators, Eberhard Knobloch is project leader of the Alexander von Humboldt research group and of two series of the Leibniz edition. In his capacity as mathematician and classical philologist he is especially interested in the ancient mathematical sciences. Geodesy and land surveying were based on mathematical methods and instruments and deeply influenced by cosmological and astronomical considerations. The writings of Hyginus Gromaticus are of highest importance in this respect.