A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia has discovered something that can alter our recorded history. Dr. Daniel Mansfield and his team were studying a 3,700-year-old tablet from ancient Babylon when they found evidence that these people were actually doing trigonometry.
With this evidence, our initial belief of the Greeks invented how we study the triangle’s sides and angles has been disproved. In fact, the Babylonians were doing trigonometric calculations 1,500 years before the Greeks!
The evidence in the tablet was actually an ancient trigonometry table. According to Mansfield, their research revealed that the Babylonians described the shapes of right-angle triangles using ratios, not angles, and circles.
Mansfield and his team are, understandably, incredibly proud. What they discovered is that the tablet is actually an ancient trigonometry table. "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. This means it has great relevance for our modern world,” he shared.
Image credit: UNSW