Those readers in the New York City area might like to pay a visit to NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Its museum is currently displaying an exhibit of Babylonian mathematical artifacts, gleaned from the collections of Columbia University, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, dated from 1900 to 1700 BCE. The artifacts include many items entirely familiar to the modern age — student exercises, word problems and calculation tables.
By examining these tablets, scholars have been also to decipher the Babylonian schemes for performing arithmetic. They have shown that the Babylonians used the same symbol to
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