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...