(LIVE SCIENCE) — Scientists recently decoded a clay tablet from ancient Babylonia that dates to around 3,700 years ago, and found that it contains the oldest trigonometric table in the world.
The tablet, discovered in the early 1900s and first interpreted in 1945, has long fascinated mathematics scholars, but they were puzzled by its description of triangles, which researchers recently linked to a type of trigonometry.
These ancient mathematical inscriptions predate the earliest known evidence of trigonometry — thought to have originated around 120 B.C. with Greek astronomer Hipparchus — by approximately 1,000 years, the researchers reported in a new study.
