The purpose of a 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet has finally been revealed. As it turns out, it was an ancient trigonometric table that the Babylonians used, beating the Greeks by more than a ...

Plimpton 322, the tablet in question, is certainly an alluring artifact. It’s a broken piece of clay roughly the size of a postcard. It was filled with four columns of cuneiform numbers around 1800 ...

About 3 700 years ago a Babylonian mathematician wrote a trigonometry table on a clay tablet that scientists say is more accurate than anything we have today. The table predates Pythagoras’s theorem ...