3 ms·
Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry
- catskul2 3y agoHeres a video on what they're talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L24GzTaOll0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L24GzTaOll0
- diydsp 3y ago"the 1's were originally there and likely contributed to the break" (cuneiform)
- bigbillheck 3y agoCounterpoint: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/dont-fall-for-babylonian-trigonometry-hype/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/dont-fal...
- lamontcg 3y agoFWIW this information is easy to find via the pubpeer browser extension. It puts a banner on this HN page which leads to a comment page which has this rebuttal linked there.
- tedunangst 3y ago"Why is 1/8 exact in base 60 but 1/4 not exact in base 10?" A question to keep us all up at night.
- elteto 3y agoSeems to me, an ignorant on the subject as a whole, that they came up with a quite complex explanation that fits the data, but we can’t know for sure and most likely never will. And this is a problem with mathematics because it is self-consistent: we can build a whole theory on top of the contents of the tablet and it will produce the correct results. We just can’t know if what we came up with was the same thing they used back then, or if we are just doing modern mathematics with some old data.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoWildberger kind of notoriously is a non-believer in real numbers, which sort of comes across with the statements about it being the only "completely accurate" trig table and comments about how the base 60 system is somehow richer and more accurate than decimal numbers.
- fluoridation 3y agoHe's probably one of those constructivists who don't believe in non-computable numbers. I recommend this post (and its comment section) to anyone interested in the subject: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-the-field-axioms/ http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-th...
- Bjartr 3y agoThat comments section is a trip and a half
- tedunangst 3y agoI'm not sure I follow how base 60 permits more exact computation than base 10.