3,700-year-old Babylonian stone tablet gets translated, changes history
They were doing trigonometry 1500 years before the Greeks.
They give a bit more context in this video. (from 2017)
By the way, I got that link from an article in The Guardian, and I can't find anything in either of those two articles that really adds on top of what was known in 2017. It could just be hard for a layperson to understand, and so was oversimplified?
TLDW is that researchers have known for decades that this tablet showed the Babylonians knew the Pythagorean Theorem for 1000 years before Pythagoras was born. So, that part isn't new.
They seem to be saying that what's new is that they understand each line of this tablet describes a different right triangle, and that due to the Babylonians counting in base 60, they can describe many more right triangles for a unit length than we can in base 10.
They feel like this can have many uses in things like surveying, computing, and in understanding trigonometry.
My take is that this was a very interesting discovery, but that they probably felt pressure to figure out a way to describe it as useful in the modern world. But we've known about the useful parts of this discovery for forever. Our clocks are all base 60. And our computers are binary, not base 10, just to start with.
We overvalue trying to make every advance in knowledge immediately useful. Knowledge can be good for its own sake.
"Having many more right triangles for a unit length" would have an incredible benefit in constructing enormous triangly things.
That's very interesting. Thank you for giving us your insight on this.
Maybe I'm an idiot but how would a base 60 system with "Cleaner fractions means fewer approximations and more accurate maths, and the researchers suggest we can learn from it today." make any difference when computers are powerful enough to generate solutions to answer with more accuracy than is ever needed in real world applications?
None, in modern context we can work in any base we desire, all that basic stuff got generalized ages ago. No one is going to change computing systems to use babylonian-style. And the trigonometry stuff is the same thing we knew, but discovered earlier than the greeks.
It's a important discovery for sure, especially for our understanding of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, but everything else is the authors and the article going bananas with conclusions.
Computers still run different algorithms internally, some of which are more prone to having undetected errors than others:
To generate most* solutions.
But I see your point.
Almost everything we think of as Greek innovations was actually the Greeks absorbing knowledge from the civilizations to their east. Greece is just when our records traditionally went back to.
Not to mention that a lot of greek texts that survived only did so thanks to the Sassanids (Persians), since the newly christian Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) began purging all that stuff because "god is all the knowledge you need".
Later on, those texts found their way back into Europe through the then Arab conquered Spain
A quick Google search shows that this is entirely incorrect (both that they were only preserved in arabic and that they made it back to Europe through al-andalus) and it's apparently a popular myth.
From multiple articles (there's a plethora of sources): Classical Greek texts were preserved in the byzantine empire and most classical Greek texts that are known today, are translations from texts that were preserved in Greek (mostly within the byzantine empire). There are a few texts that only survived for a time as Arabic translations, but according to what I read, those are only few compared to what was preserved in Greek.
Yeah fuck that upworthy spam. Here's the original article from The Guardian.
Not significantly better:
"which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today."
No they obviously do not. Yeah the fractions are easier in base 60, but they are not more accurate than just using rational numbers or radicals in any other base.
I'm partial to base 36
It is significantly better, it's not spam reposting crap.
Thank you. I wasn't going to click on that trash.
Article originally appeared 07/22/21. Any follow up?
Older even - 2017: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-solved-a-maths-problem-on-this-3-700-year-old-clay-tablet
The news articles seem a bit off though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322?wprov=sfla1
I love history and discoveries like this fascinate me, but do they serve any functional purpose? Does knowing that Babylonians understood angles change anything in my daily or long term life?
Not trying to be critical, just a question I often pose myself but have yet to think of a reassuring answer for.
It might give you new respect for the Babylonians, and act as a corrective to the modern tendency to assume superiority. It might enhance your sense of how similar we all are and how connected, and your kinship with people who lived millennia before you. If little discoveries like this make us just a little more sensitive to the transience of even the most sophisticated societies, the kinship of all people and the sheer length of human history compared to the shortness of our individual lives, it might make us just a little more considerate and respectful in how we treat our world and our peers. The value of such discoveries is their cumulative influence on our understanding of ourselves and how we fit into the world. It makes us wiser.
Beautifully put
Learning new stuff could be good for your brain. Sometimes you just gotta learn for the sake of learning!
If you'd read the article you might have an answer.
It could potentially get you laid or land you a job. So, yes.
This is cool and all, but it's a 6 year old story.
I think you meant 3706 years old.
It was already known that the Sumerians were calculating ratios of triangles and applying knowledge of degrees to circle calculations thousands of years before Hipparchus' work. Whether or not this small stone tablet indicates that the Babylonians had a rigorous system in the same manner the Greeks developed, remains to be seen.
Move I've Pythagoras, it's Nebuchadnezzar's show now!
I thought things felt a little different today
Drink more Ovaltine?
A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!
Actually, history didn't change it's still the same as it always was. It can't change anymore since it happened in the past.
actually history is just our collective understanding of the past, so if it changes, history changes
I think it's fair to say that our understanding of history, something which can change because it's always in the context of the present, has changed.
The events that actually happened in the past didn't change. But history is not what happened. History is what we think we know happened.
If there is new information about events we didn't know about before, history changes.
Great input thank you!
The past doesn't change. History can change though.
