A few days ago, Australian mathematician Dr. Daniel Mansfield was researching a 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay artifact featuring tablets or slates inscribed with various numbers. He managed to decipher the codes recorded on that slate. He discovered that advanced knowledge of trigonometry existed more than a millennium before the Greek mathematicians. This revelation is drawing worldwide attention as a groundbreaking event in the history of mathematics.
Photo: Dr. Daniel Mansfield (collected from the internet, https://www.unsw.edu.au/news/2021/08/daniel-mansfield-uncovers-world-s-oldest-known-example-of-applie)
In 2017, Dr. Daniel Mansfield and his team from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) analyzed a slate named Plimpton 322. This tablet was discovered in southern Iraq in the early twentieth century. It contains a set of numbers arranged in four columns and fifteen rows, resembling mathematical digits.
Dr. Mansfield and his colleague Dr. Norman Wildberger deciphered these numbers and found that it was actually a trigonometric table. While Greek trigonometry is based on angles and circles, Babylonian trigonometry relied on the ratios of the sides of right-angled triangles and a base-60 (sexagesimal) number system. This method allowed the Babylonians to perform highly accurate complex calculations, which were especially advantageous in surveying and architecture. This discovery proves that people of that era could solve problems related to these sides with extraordinary precision.
Before this discovery, it was widely believed that Greek mathematicians were the first to introduce advanced concepts of trigonometry. But this new finding proves that the Babylonians had already acquired this knowledge at least 1,000 years before the Greeks. It compels us to revisit and reconsider our current understanding of the mathematical prowess of ancient civilizations.
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