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Title: Forget trigonometry, 'cos Babylonians did it better 3,700 years ago – by counting in base 60!
Source:
The Register
URL Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/ ... ton_322_babylonian_trig_table/
Published: Aug 25, 2017
Author: Simon Sharwood
Post Date: 2017-08-25 11:26:09 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 2067
Comments: 7
Those of you who can remember trigonometry can feel free to forget it, because ancient Babylonian mathematicians had a better way of doing it – using base 60! That's the conclusion of a new paper, Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry, in the new issue of the journal Historia Mathematica. The “Plimpton 322” from the title is a clay tablet inscribed with cuneiform script. Discovered in the early 1900s, the tablet has been of interest to mathematicians for years because it describes Pythagoras' theorem, yet is thought to have been created around 1800BC, more than a thousand years before Pythagoras was born and started tinkering with triangles. The rest of the tablet's four columns and fifteen rows of numbers have been debated for some time, but in the paper Daniel Mansfield and N.J. Wildberger, both of the University of New South Wales' School of Mathematics and Statistics, suggest it was a trigonometric table. Mansfield explains his work in the video below: 
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#2. To: Deckard (#0)
The base 10 system we use today really offers no advantages that I know of. I've always imagined base 10 is the human norm because we have 10 fingers. Base 12 would probably be far more advantageous as it's evenly divisible by twice as many numbers as 10 is.
Yes, there's a lot of sense in that; we're just used to being able to count on our fingers from the cave days. A couple more symbols tacked on after the number 9 and it would be just as natural - if we'd grown up with it.
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#6. To: Pinguinite (#2)
Base 12 would probably be far more advantageous as it's evenly divisible by twice as many numbers as 10 is.
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