Thank the Babylonians, not Pythagoras, for trigonometry
Most every kid learns a² + b² = c² in math. Pythagoras, right? Wrong. Babylonians used trigonometry 1,000 years before the Greeks. Time to rewrite history?
It was first unearthed in 1894 near where the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, is located today. But it was left to rest, forgotten in some corner of Istanbul's Archaeological Museum.
Mansfield, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, got excited about the perfect angles he could see on it. So, he went to Turkey to investigate and find out more.
Dating back to the Old Babylonian period about 3,700 years ago, it could be the oldest known example of applied geometry. It also holds the secrets of an ancient understanding of triangles ... and how they resolved land disputes.
"The discovery and analysis of the tablet have important implications for the history of mathematics," says Mansfield.
