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.
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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.
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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 ...
There are 12 half-tones to an octave.
Base 60 is not more accurate than base 10. Since the Babylonian’s calculated that a year was only 360 days (which is not bad considering they used a stick in the ground to determine how long a year was) it makes sense to use base 60. The Babylonian’s did not understand geometry or trigonometry, they also did not understand right triangles. They discovered that a 3-4-5 was a right triangle, but they could not generalise their results. Euclid is still the Father of Geometry.
I am working on a paper about right triangles that I hope to publish this year, and I am working on a new class of analytic functions that are related to deformation geometry. I love math!
Man, that’s going to throw some folks off...
Bookmark.
The sexagesimal system never made much sense for people who had five fingers on each hand. But if the Sumerians were taught math by ET visitors who had six fingers on each hand...
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60 is a highly composite number and is very convenient for making astronomical calculations. They were very good at predicting eclipses, too.
And 49 is far easier to divide by seven. So what?
Looks like a dried out block of cheese....
Actually that is not far from the truth ... all we know today about the entire electromagnetic spectrum - from Einstein to Tesla (the man) - comes from 4 equations altered from their original form by a self-taught moma’s boy named Oliver Heaviside in the 19th century.
He took James Clerk Maxwell 200 quaternions (a sort of field equations) and, discarding all but 4, transformed them from field to vector equations - because these were obvious mathematical “abominations,” and he not believing in fields, eliminated them.
So what were in the original remaining 196? If you can find a copy of the original - not a modern edition - by Maxwell and have a good working knowledge of math, you might discover that it is possible to move in one step from any place to any other place in the Universe; that energy is unlimited; that communications is not limited by distance or time; among many other things which to our self-limited knowledge seems like magic.
No unicorns required.
Probably Fire (set by Antifa?)
http://www.ancient.eu/article/207/
“What happened to the Great Library at Alexandria?”
This progress is akin to a 5 year old building a nuclear-powered space ship in a common basement with just the tools and materials found there. Why is he doing it, what does he get out of it, and where does he intend to go with it, for what purpose?
In other words, there was one or more civilizations which have not been found to date (or have been found but not recognized ... 12,000 year old Göbekli Tepe comes to mind) that preceded it.
Kalaka /ultra obscure
Who gets the reference?
PS no fair looking it up.
I think it would be an interesting study to relearn the Babylonian system.
I liked your link.
I think this is an amazingly valuable discovery but it appears many are trying to make more of it than is there.
We credit Christopher Columbus with the discovery of the Americas because he made the discovery stick; not because he was first.
Thank you. I saw that many others posted some nice scientific and historical information after my post too. I’m looking at those right now.
Way to go. That paper and those new functions sound super cool. Math is so much more fun as an adult, knowing how to code, and having the internet. So much high end free knowledge content on the web. We are lucky and probably living in this great time in math - I guess it’s a bit broken but I don’t understand all that godel stuff. Keep up the good work
I never believed trigonometry began so late with the Greeks. To me, a culture like the Ancient Egyptians of 2500 BC that could build such monumental pyramids had to have known some advanced mathematical systems.
We just don’t know the lost knowledge they had. They could not have been mathematical simpletons. It just doesn’t pass the gut test.
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