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Babylonian mathematics is a range of numeric and more advanced mathematical practices in the ancient Near East, written in cuneiform script. Study has historically focused on the First Babylonian dynasty old Babylonian period in the early second millennium BC due to the wealth of data available.
As understood through analyses of early proto-cuneiform notations from the city of Uruk, there were more than a dozen different counting systems, [18] including a general system for counting most discrete objects (such as animals, tools, and people) and specialized systems for counting cheese and grain products, volumes of grain (including ...
The Babylonian system is credited as being the first known positional numeral system, in which the value of a particular digit depends both on the digit itself and its position within the number. This was an extremely important development because non-place-value systems require unique symbols to represent each power of a base (ten, one hundred ...
YBC 7289 is a Babylonian clay tablet notable for containing an accurate sexagesimal approximation to the square root of 2, the length of the diagonal of a unit square. This number is given to the equivalent of six decimal digits, "the greatest known computational accuracy ... in the ancient world". [ 1 ]
Babylonian tablet (c. 1800–1600 BCE), showing an approximation of √ 2 (1 24 51 10 in sexagesimal) in the context of the Pythagorean theorem for an isosceles triangle. Written mathematics began with numbers expressed as tally marks, with each tally representing a single unit. Numerical symbols consisted probably of strokes or notches cut in ...
Unlike the Babylonian system, the Greek base of 60 was not used for expressing integers. With this sexagesimal positional system – with a subbase of 10 – for expressing fractions, fourteen of the alphabetic numerals were used (the units from 1 to 9 and the decades from 10 to 50) in order to write any number from 1 through 59. These could be ...
Plimpton 322 is a Babylonian clay tablet, believed to have been written around 1800 BC, that contains a mathematical table written in cuneiform script.Each row of the table relates to a Pythagorean triple, that is, a triple of integers (,,) that satisfies the Pythagorean theorem, + =, the rule that equates the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle to the square of the hypotenuse.
IM 67118, also known as Db 2-146, is an Old Babylonian clay tablet in the collection of the Iraq Museum that contains the solution to a problem in plane geometry concerning a rectangle with given area and diagonal. In the last part of the text, the solution is proved correct using the Pythagorean theorem. The steps of the solution are believed ...