The culture of science is quite good at acknowledging its predecessors. Scarcely does one go through an undergraduate physics or math curriculum without learning about Newton, Hamilton, Maxwell, Euler, or Gauss, amongst others. It is important, if not enriching, to understand and acknowledge the long history and momentous effort that went into developing our current understanding of physics and mathematics for various reasons. However, the science of the Maya is scarcely acknowledged. While there may be many different reasons, one is that the corpus of literature is much smaller, less known, and less explored. There are only four intact Mayan texts (codices), with the rest of our sources largely coming from archeology on Mayan structures. Even with just this, we’re still able to realize the Mayans developed sophisticated arithmetic, particularly concerning astronomy.

A paper came out in July 2026 that identifies what is likely a signature or attribution of the Mayan mathematician Sak Tahn Waax, meaning ‘White-Chested Fox’. The signature was found in a chamber at the site Xultun under a sizable amount of mathematical scratch work that attempts to calculate astronomical events. While it is not entirely clear whether this is an attribution to a prior astronomer-mathematician, or whether this was the author who inscribed the hieroglyphs, it seems this is likely the name of a Mayan mathematician who was greatly interested in the calculations of astronomical dates. This is unprecedented; we know of no other attributions to Mayan mathematicians.

Some interesting, if not unique patterns were discovered in the calculations. For example, the Mayan month of 20 days, the Mayan calendar ritual year of 260 days, the Mars year of 780 days, and the Tun of 360 days (a Mayan unit of time) were shown to form an interesting relation with the Venus synodic cycle (the technical term for Venus aligning with the sun and Earth). Sak Tahn Waax showed that 1 * 20 + 1 * 260 + 2 * 780 + 3 * 360 = 5 * 584. That is, one Mayan calendar month, one Tzolkin, two Mars years, and three Tun cycles (a Mayan unit of time), add to give five synodic cycles of Venus.

A question that remains is whether the Mayans were aware that this equation has the first three steps of the Fibonacci Sequence in it. Notice that 1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3, and 2 + 3 = 5. These numbers (the numbers multiplied by the time intervals above) form the first three steps of a recursive pattern where you start out with two numbers, say 1 and 1, and you add them to obtain 2. Then you add 1 to the previous sum, 2, to obtain 3. Then you add the first sum to the second sum (2 + 3) to get the third sum, 5, and so on. These summations form a sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,....

So it seems that while we have likely identified the first signature of a mathematician/astronomer in Mayan culture, we still don’t know to what extent this mathematician or the Maya, in general, mastered or understood different aspects of arithmetic, including whether this Fibonacci sequence was intentionally recognized or incidental in the astronomy calculations. An acknowledgement of the Fibonacci sequence would be quite profound, as Mayans tend to deeply intertwine their studies of mathematics, astronomy, and religion. As archeological research continues, we will likely learn more about the true extent of the mathematical developments of classical Maya.