Plimpton 322
At the beginning of the 19th century nearly half a million clay tablets of the Babylonians were excavated, around 400 of these tablets deal with mathematics . The most famous of these tablets is now in the GA Plimpton Collection of Columbia University and bears the number 322.
The tablet was made between 1800 BC. BC and 1650 BC . Chr created and contains a table of four columns and 15 rows filled with the Babylon numeral its cuneiform (see Babylon mathematics and sexagesimal ). In 1945 the researcher Otto Neugebauer found out that these were Pythagorean triples , which means that the Babylonians knew the meaning of these numbers as early as 1000 years before Pythagoras .
Although the meaning of the tablet has been known for a long time, its usefulness is unknown.
An assumption by Eleanor Robson of the University of Oxford says that teachers could easily write new assignments for their students with the help of the blackboard without having to recalculate them every time.
Web links
- Pythagoras theorem in Babylonian mathematics
- The Babylonia tablet Plimpton 322 (English)
- The Babylonian cuneiform tablet Plimpton 322
Individual evidence
- ^ Eleanor Robson: Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Babylon. A reassessment of Plimpton 322. In: Historia Mathematica 28 (2001), p. 167.206. - Eleanor Robson: Words and pictures. New light on Plimpton 322. In: The American Mathematical Monthly 109 (2002), pp. 105-120.