This 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Clay Tablet Just Changed The History of Maths.
A Babylonian clay tablet dating back 3,700 years has been identified as the world's oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, suggesting the Babylonians beat the ancient Greeks to the invention of trigonometry by over 1,000 years.
The tablet, known as Plimpton 322, was discovered in the early
1900s in what is now southern Irag, but researchers have always been baffled about what its purpose was.
Thanks to a team from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, the mystery may have been solved.
More than that, the Babylonian
method of calculating trigonometric values could
have something to teach mathematicians today.
"Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the
shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of
trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles,"
says one of the researchers, Daniel Mansfield "It is a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius."
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-solved
-a-maths-problem-on-this-3-700-year-old-clay-tablet
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