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Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry

83 pointsby Lucover 1 year ago

6 comments

empath-nirvanaover 1 year ago
Wildberger kind of notoriously is a non-believer in real numbers, which sort of comes across with the statements about it being the only "completely accurate" trig table and comments about how the base 60 system is somehow richer and more accurate than decimal numbers.
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bigbillheckover 1 year ago
Counterpoint: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;roots-of-unity&#x2F;dont-fall-for-babylonian-trigonometry-hype&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;roots-of-unity&#x2F;dont-fal...</a>
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eltetoover 1 year ago
Seems to me, an ignorant on the subject as a whole, that they came up with a quite complex explanation that fits the data, but we can’t know for sure and most likely never will. And this is a problem with mathematics because it is self-consistent: we can build a whole theory on top of the contents of the tablet and it will produce the correct results. We just can’t know if what we came up with was the same thing they used back then, or if we are just doing modern mathematics with some old data.
diydspover 1 year ago
&quot;the 1&#x27;s were originally there and likely contributed to the break&quot; (cuneiform)
catskul2over 1 year ago
Heres a video on what they&#x27;re talking about: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=L24GzTaOll0">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=L24GzTaOll0</a>
tedunangstover 1 year ago
I&#x27;m not sure I follow how base 60 permits more exact computation than base 10.
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