3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet rewrites the history of maths – and shows the Greeks did not develop trigonometry

In short, the small clay tablet is a trigonometric table. The claim is that Babylonian trigonometry is superior to modern trigbecause the Babylonians used base-60, while we use base-10. I’d argue that modern trigonometry is superior because we used base-gimme-the-damn-calculator.

Also, the title of the article seems not entirely accurate. It may well be that the Babylonians were using trigonometry tables a thousand years before Hipparchus came on the scene, but that doesn’t mean the Greeks didn’t develop trigonometry: they may well have simply developed it *separately.* Various areas of mathematics have been independently developed over the millenia by widely separated groups.

The existence of trig 3,700 years ago s both cool… and a bit depressing. One does not need to go into the whackadoodle Ancient Aliens & Atlantis territory to realize that there were some surprisingly advanced areas of mathematics, science and technology long ago… the Antikythera mechanism being perhaps the most famous.  At least *technically,* humanity *could* have embarked on an industrial revolution more than 2,000 years ago, rather than only within the last 300 years, meaning that today mankind could have wholly colonized the solar system and be well on out way out among the stars. But while the pieces were there, it was to big of  task to put them all together.

One if left to wonder what we might have floating around today in widely separated and apparently irrelevant chunks that a few thousand years from now people will see as the obvious parts to their cultural machines. Maybe the proper merging of Little Caesar’s pizza baking technology to the Hall–Héroult process with Hello Kitty, Ginsu Knives, televangelism and tentacle porn will produce a practical low-cost interstellar propulsion system.

But I ain’t learnin’ no base-60 math.