Records of their mathematical achievements are found on clay tablets first unearthed by European archaeologists in the nineteenth century. Among other achievements the Babylonians were able to solve what we would today call quadratic equations and possessed rules for generating Pythagorean triplets of numbers. The lecture provided an overview of Babylonian mathematics and then considered, among other things, the methods that the Babylonians used to obtain approximations to the square root of 2. Facsimiles of original Babylonian tablets were circulated and sample problems from their texts were posed as challenges for the audience to solve. Here are some notes, references, sample problems and solutions.
Every professional mathematician is familiar with the following experience.
You meet someone at a party and they ask you what you do for a living. The greatest challenge in my work as a teacher is trying to transmit my enthusiasm for solving problems to my students. In this session I would like to share with you some problems that might get people, young and old hooked on problem solving with reasoning. The door prizes went to Doug Sloan, Larry Rice and Shaloub Razak. This equation has a long history that goes back to sixth-century India, and over the past four hundred years, European mathematics have studied it, eventually developing a coherent theory that can be extended to certain diophantine equations of higher degree.