Plimpton 322

[Toroid]

A clay tablet that's 3,700 years old proves the Babylonians developed trigonometry before the Greeks.
3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet rewrites the history of maths - and shows the Greeks did not develop trigonometry

A 3,700-year-old clay tablet has proven that the Babylonians developed trigonometry 1,500 years before the Greeks and were using a sophisticated method of mathematics which could change how we calculate today.

The tablet, known as Plimpton 322, was discovered in the early 1900s in Southern Iraq by the American archaeologist and diplomat Edgar Banks, who was the inspiration for Indiana Jones.

The true meaning of the tablet has eluded experts until now but new research by the University of New South Wales, Australia, has shown it is the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, which was probably used by ancient architects to construct temples, palaces and canals.

However unlike today’s trigonometry, Babylonian mathematics used a base 60, or sexagesimal system, rather than the 10 which is used today. Because 60 is far easier to divide by three, experts studying the tablet, found that the calculations are far more accurate.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=L24GzTaOll0

Published on Aug 24, 2017
What is the true role and meaning of Plimpton 322, the most famous mathematical clay tablet from Old Babylonian times? In this video Daniel and Norman explain their new theory: that Plimpton 322 was actually the world's first trigonometric table, but this was a ratio-based trigonometry, not an angle-based trigonometry. Remarkably, this table is also the world's only exact trigonometry table; all subsequent tables have been approximate.

To understand why, we need to understand how the OB scribes thought about triangles as half of a rectangle consisting of a short side, a long side and a diagonal. Ratios in such a triangle were based around their notion of ukullu, which they shared with the ancient Egyptians, who called it seqed. P322 turns out to exactly all someone to look up an exact integral triangle from a single ratio of sides, and then to deduce other ratios: crucially without invoking a square root calculation.

The paper on which this video is based has been published in Historia Mathematica at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/.... The title is "Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry" and it is by Daniel Mansfield and N J Wildberger from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Science, UNSW Sydney.

 

[Gambeir]

Oh we need to shut this information down and outlaw it. Think of the cost to re-writing the official version of reality.