New Delhi:
Scientists have spilled the secrets of a 3,700-year-old broken babylonian clay tablet in the stockpile of the Columbia University, according to the recent report published in The Guardian.
It suggested that the Babylonians beat the ancient Greeks to the invention of trigonometry by over 1,000 years.
A mysterious Babylonian genius took a clay tablet and a reed pen and marked out not only Pythagoras theorem but also a sequence of trigonometry tables which is more authentic and credible than any other available today said, researchers team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
According to other experts, the work on tablet-Plimpton 322 (P322) is hypothetical. The infamous P322 tablet was discovered in the early 1900s in southern Iraq.
The scientists presumed that the tablet could have been used in calculations for construction of temples and buildings.
The tablet was discovered by the UNSW Sydney. The left-hand edge of the tablet is broken and the researchers build on previous research to present new mathematical evidence that there were originally six columns and that the tablet was meant to be completed with 38 rows.
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Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles. It is a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius.
“The tablet not only contains the world’s oldest trigonometric table; it is also the only completely accurate trigonometric table, because of the very different Babylonian approach to arithmetic and geometry,” says Dr Daniel Mansfield of the School of Mathematics and Statistics in the UNSW Faculty of Science.
Sciencemag.org quotes Mathematical historian Christine Proust as saying “(The idea is) mathematically robust, but for the time being, it is highly speculative.” “(It) is really an open question at the moment,” she says.
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