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 represent different numerical values, anticipating our modern Indo-Arabic system, where a ‘1’, for instance, can mean 1, 10, 100 or more, depending on its position. There are also intimations that the Babylonians may have understood the rudiments of the Pythagorean theorem, which was not formally proved until 400 BC.
Additional details are available in an interesting article by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times, from which the above note was summarized [Rothstein2010].
References
- [Rothstein2010] Edward Rothstein, “Masters of Math: Babylonian Tablets That Survived Millenniums,” New York Times, 26 Nov 2010, available at Online article.