They give a bit more context in this video. (from 2017)
By the way, I got that link from an article in The Guardian, and I can’t find anything in either of those two articles that really adds on top of what was known in 2017. It could just be hard for a layperson to understand, and so was oversimplified?
TLDW is that researchers have known for decades that this tablet showed the Babylonians knew the Pythagorean Theorem for 1000 years before Pythagoras was born. So, that part isn’t new.
They seem to be saying that what’s new is that they understand each line of this tablet describes a different right triangle, and that due to the Babylonians counting in base 60, they can describe many more right triangles for a unit length than we can in base 10.
They feel like this can have many uses in things like surveying, computing, and in understanding trigonometry.
My take is that this was a very interesting discovery, but that they probably felt pressure to figure out a way to describe it as useful in the modern world. But we’ve known about the useful parts of this discovery for forever. Our clocks are all base 60. And our computers are binary, not base 10, just to start with.
We overvalue trying to make every advance in knowledge immediately useful. Knowledge can be good for its own sake.
“Having many more right triangles for a unit length” would have an incredible benefit in constructing enormous triangly things.
Instead becoming more acute about triangly things… we were more obtuse and went base ten
Well yeah, who’s got 60 fingers? I mean sure, there’s Fingers Georg, but that guy’s weird.
Some days I wonder what would be different if we’d evolved with six fingers on each hand.
Maybe I’m an idiot but how would a base 60 system with “Cleaner fractions means fewer approximations and more accurate maths, and the researchers suggest we can learn from it today.” make any difference when computers are powerful enough to generate solutions to answer with more accuracy than is ever needed in real world applications?
None, in modern context we can work in any base we desire, all that basic stuff got generalized ages ago. No one is going to change computing systems to use babylonian-style. And the trigonometry stuff is the same thing we knew, but discovered earlier than the greeks.
It’s a important discovery for sure, especially for our understanding of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, but everything else is the authors and the article going bananas with conclusions.
That’s kind of what I figured. I wish journalism didn’t need to be so incredibly sensationalist. I understand that it’s because the majority of the populace has the attention span of a gnat but it doesn’t make me feel any less annoyed by it.
Computers still run different algorithms internally, some of which are more prone to having undetected errors than others:
Computers use base 2, binary. Whether humans use base 10 or base 60 is irrelevant.
The algorithms coded into computers are not in base 2, though. Only operating functions of the computer itself are in base 2.
You don’t code in binary
So, I’m a writer, not a researcher, but I’ve found the more tools I have stuffed into my brain, the more likely it is that two different things clank against each other and create something interesting.
I don’t think this is something unique to writing fiction–from my understanding of history, there’s quite a few moments in science where two somewhat unrelated things bash against each other and spark a new idea.
Sure, computers can do things we already know how to do, but actual inventors/scientists/people making stuff still need to think up things first before you can computerize it.
It’s possible that this WON’T do anything new in the realm of math, but it might create a string a researcher in a different domain–history, linguistics, whatever–can pull on to unravel something else. A diverse tool set leads to multiple ways to solve a given problem, and sometimes edge cases come up where one solution actually is better in some niche application because of something unique to the way it is shaped.
Almost everything we think of as Greek innovations was actually the Greeks absorbing knowledge from the civilizations to their east. Greece is just when our records traditionally went back to.
Not to mention that a lot of greek texts that survived only did so thanks to the Sassanids (Persians), since the newly christian Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) began purging all that stuff because “god is all the knowledge you need”.
Later on, those texts found their way back into Europe through the then Arab conquered Spain
A quick Google search shows that this is entirely incorrect (both that they were only preserved in arabic and that they made it back to Europe through al-andalus) and it’s apparently a popular myth.
From multiple articles (there’s a plethora of sources): Classical Greek texts were preserved in the byzantine empire and most classical Greek texts that are known today, are translations from texts that were preserved in Greek (mostly within the byzantine empire). There are a few texts that only survived for a time as Arabic translations, but according to what I read, those are only few compared to what was preserved in Greek.
Yeah fuck that upworthy spam. Here’s the original article from The Guardian.
Not significantly better:
“which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today.”
No they obviously do not. Yeah the fractions are easier in base 60, but they are not more accurate than just using rational numbers or radicals in any other base.
I’m partial to base 36
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“10” is a square that’s also the product of two squares, 4 and 9
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highly divisible, being able to simply express halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, and ninths, also twelfths and eighteenths but those are less common portions in daily use
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you can represent it as [0 - Z], as in “…8, 9, A, B, C…”, it’s literally achieved by just adding the alphabet to the numeral system.
Article originally appeared 07/22/21. Any follow up?
Older even - 2017: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-solved-a-maths-problem-on-this-3-700-year-old-clay-tablet
The news articles seem a bit off though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322?wprov=sfla1
