Care must be exercised to see the tablet in terms of methods familiar or accessible to scribes at the time. Much has been written on the subject, including some speculation (perhaps anachronistic) as to whether the tablet could have served as an early trigonometrical table. The triples are too many and too large to have been obtained by brute force. The Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 gives an approximation to 2. The majority of recovered clay tablets date from 1800 to 1600 BC, and cover topics that include fractions, algebra, quadratic and cubic equations and the Pythagorean theorem. Written in cuneiform, tablets were inscribed while the clay was moist, and baked hard in an oven or by the heat of the sun. In contrast to the scarcity of sources in Egyptian mathematics, knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is derived from hundreds of clay tablets unearthed since the 1850s. Babylonian mathematics remained constant, in character and content, for over a millennium. With respect to content, there is scarcely any difference between the two groups of texts. With respect to time they fall in two distinct groups: one from the Old Babylonian period (1830–1531 BC), the other mainly Seleucid from the last three or four centuries BC. Babylonian mathematical texts are plentiful and well edited. The tablet also gives an example where one side of the square is 30, and the resulting diagonal is 42 25 35 or 42.4263888.īabylonian mathematics (also known as Assyro-Babylonian mathematics ) are the mathematics developed or practiced by the people of Mesopotamia, from the days of the early Sumerians to the centuries following the fall of Babylon in 539 BC. The diagonal displays an approximation of the square root of 2 in four sexagesimal figures, 1 24 51 10, which is good to about six decimal digits.ġ + 24/60 + 51/60 2 + 10/60 3 = 1.41421296. See also: Babylonian cuneiform numerals Babylonian clay tablet YBC 7289 with annotations.
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