Babylon Base 60: Ancient math was better than ours
Channel: Civil Disturbia
Date: 2017-08-26

For more info on OB tablet Plimpton 322 go here - https://youtu.be/L24GzTaOll0

Scientists have discovered the purpose of a 3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet. It is a trigonometric table, “so unfamiliar and advanced that in some respects it is superior even to modern trigonometry.” It also throws the origins of trigonometry into dispute.

What is the true role and meaning of Plimpton 322, the most famous mathematical clay tablet from Old Babylonian times? In this video Daniel and Norman explain their new theory: that Plimpton 322 was actually the world's first trigonometric table, but this was a ratio-based trigonometry, not an angle-based trigonometry. Remarkably, this table is also the world's only exact trigonometry table; all subsequent tables have been approximate. To understand why, we need to understand how the OB scribes thought about triangles as half of a rectangle consisting of a short side, a long side and a diagonal. Ratios in such a triangle were based around their notion of ukullu, which they shared with the ancient Egyptians, who called it seqed. P322 turns out to exactly all someone to look up an exact integral triangle from a single ratio of sides, and then to deduce other ratios: crucially without invoking a square root calculation. The paper on which this video is based has been published in Historia Mathematica at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/.... The title is "Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry" and it is by Daniel Mansfield and N J Wildberger from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Science, UNSW Sydney.

Original RT video - https://youtu.be/0LPmZsOyYfM