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Wait, so this fellow came up with "rational trigonometry" more than a decade ago and just happened to find a Babylonian tablet suggesting that the Babylonians u

• jhayward 9y ago
  Without commenting on the article itself I see nothing suspicious. Indeed, he may have come up with the idea while studying some forms of ancient computation then gone looking for more evidence. I wouldn't cast aspersions as lightly as this.
• tzs 9y ago
  If "rational trigonometry" was something completely weird and totally out of left field, then yeah, then that would be a little unbelievable. But really, if you think about it, measuring angles by ratios of sides of right triangles is not weird if your primary interest in measuring angles is for practical applications rather than abstract theory. Accurate rulers are easier to make than accurate protractors, and are easier to work with on the construction site. So it would not at all be surprising if some ancient peoples worked with sides instead of angles. Since Wildberger advocates that kind of approach to trigonometry, it makes sense that he'd recognize when someone else might be using such a system.