MERLIN SCIENCE — Plimpton 322: Babylonian Trigonometry Predating Greek Mathematics by a — E8 Intelligence Research

Let's start with the finding itself, because it deserves to be stated plainly: Plimpton 322, a Babylonian clay tablet from about 1800 BCE, contains a systematic table of Pythagorean triples—sets of whole numbers like 3, 4, and 5 where the square of the largest equals the sum of the squares of the other two. That is not a random list. It is a complete algorithm for generating every such triple, and it does so using base-60 arithmetic. That predates Greek trigonometry by roughly a thousand years. Now, what does that mean for you, as a working scientist? We tend to think of trigonometry as starting with the Greeks—with chords and angles and the circle. But the Babylonians were already there, not with angles measured in degrees, but with ratios. The tablet's columns give, for each triple, the squared ratio of the hypotenuse to one leg, and the squared ratio of the other leg to that same leg. In modern terms, that is equivalent to a rational parametrization of the unit circle: every point Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com