Researchers in Australia say an ancient Babylonian tablet that’s considered the world’s oldest trigonometric table was a far more powerful tool than it’s given credit for.
The square tablet, known as Plimpton 322, is roughly the size of a cell phone and features four columns and 15 rows of cuneiform numbers written on it. Artifacts dealer Edgar Banks—the man who Indiana Jones is based off of— sold the 3,700-year-old artifact to New York publisher George Arthur Plimpton in 1923, and it was discovered near the ancient city of Larsa in Iraq. In the early 1940s, Brown University mathematics historian Otto Neugebauer studied Plimpton 322 and concluded that the rows and columns of numbers formed parts of Pythagorean triples, or three numbers that provide a solution to the equation a2 + b2 = c2. The number series 3,4,5 is a popular “triple” example, and it’s also the equation used to describe the dimensions of right-angle triangles.
Neugebauer’s theory was notable because it meant the Babylonians were articulating these integer solutions 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born. Therefore, the Babylonians, not the Greeks, were the pioneers of trigonometry.
Mathematical firsts aside, it still wasn’t clear how the Babylonians used this chunk of clay. In 2001, Eleanor Robson, an expert on Mesopotamian mathematics, offered a more mundane explanation for the tablet’s purpose. She demonstrated that Neugebauer’s theory doesn’t explain how certain values on the chart were chosen, how and why the table entries were ordered, or what purpose numbers in the first column served.
8-6-2021 (August 6, 2021) is the Snakiest day of the year and it’s also this year’s CircuitPython Day! The day highlights all things CircuitPython and Python on Hardware. See you there!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
