Posted on 08/24/2017 7:42:25 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The tablet, known as Plimpton 332, was discovered in the early 1900s...
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.
...
Hipparchus, who lived around 120BC, has long been regarded as the father of trigonometry, with his ‘table of chords’ on a circle considered the oldest trigonometric table.
A trigonometric table allows a user to determine two unknown ratios of a right-angled triangle using just one known ratio. But the tablet is far older than Hipparchus, demonstrating that the Babylonians were already well advanced in complex mathematics far earlier.
...
The 15 rows on the tablet describe a sequence of 15 right-angle triangles, which are steadily decreasing in inclination.
The left-hand edge of the tablet is broken but the researchers believe t there were originally six columns and that the tablet was meant to be completed with 38 rows.
“Plimpton 322 was a powerful tool that could have been used for surveying fields or making architectural calculations to build palaces, temples or step pyramids,” added Dr Mansfield.
The new study is published in Historia Mathematica, the official journal of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
> This makes no logical sense. Calculations of what are more accurate? And as long as one is using integers, there is always a point at which dividing by three leads to an indefinable number, no matter what the starting number is. Now, if one chooses to use other types of numbers—for instance, fractions—many more opportunities for accurate calculations come up. And a whole lot of messiness can be avoided by using pi in one’s calculations.
They’re more accurate because you can hold a much larger chunk of a fraction in a base 60 system than in a base 10 system in the same amount of column space. Tables are always approximations within a given space.
Base 10 math is was created so that dumber people could do math. Larger bases are preferable if you have the brain power to work with them.
makes total sense if you see this as a matter of POLITICS and not actual documented history.
How does that apply to the music scales? there are not 60 notes.
4Ltr
NOPE, base 10 it is for me. Ten fingers. This sounds like hogwash.
‘It only involves ratios; you don’t need to study trigonometry, sin, cosx, tan.”uh huh, NO! Sounds like Common Core Math Gibberish to me. These are the folks who bring us ‘new ways’ of doing multiplication that absolutely NO teacher can teach and NO student has a clue about.
I’m sticking with Euclid thanks.
Not just that but as Islam spread libraries burned, everywhere. The Islamophiles want us to be thankful for the small portion that the Muslims didn’t burn ... which is like a woman being told to be thankful for that one time in ten she wasn’t violently raped.
I thought it was Austin Powers.
Saw this ... looked into it. Did the arithmetic on the first entry, which seems to verify that it is trigonometric in nature ... unless the relations among the 3 numbers of the first line are insanely coincidental!
Naturally the news wants to hype this up. It’s incredible enough to me that the Babylonians could do ( albeit simple ) trigonmetric calcuations to this degree of precision.
I think “precision” is the watchword. That seemed to be their obsession. ( One I share! )
It’s Greek to me!
Whether or not the base 60 system is superior this shows the Greeks did not steal trig from the Babylonians or their system would also be base 60.
They were this smart 3,700 years ago yet....
I bet the politicians of the time stopped progress for their selfish reasons just like today.
Imagine what could have been. Travel to the stars for your vacation. Electric cars powered by unicorns....
Base 60 is so weird...
What grasshopper? ... Not weird at all, master!
Off the cuff, and by no means authoritative ...
The Babylonians were advanced insofar as they had a “place” system, which gave them great facility in calculation.
The Greeks thought geometrically, and did not emphasize calculation. If you peruse the writings of Apollonius of Perga on the Conic Sections, you will see all the familiar properties of ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas laid out in a completely incomprehensible abstract form.
Thankfully, one may find graphical animations on the internet showing how these abstract relations relate to our familiar analytic descriptions.
Giving all credit to the Babylonians, they did not rise to the level of mathematical sophistication we inherit from the Greeks.
Look into rational trigonometry.
Divide an interval of a fifth by an interval of a third.
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