Related papers: On the evidence of a trigonometric function value …
There is little known about the methods used by the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians to arrive at their recorded estimates of the value of Pi. A surprisingly accurate estimate of Pi was recently revealed coded within a verse in the book of…
This study reconstructs the origin of a constant, here called $\Xi$ (Xi), as a primary scaling factor in Old Babylonian mathematics and astronomy. $\Xi$ arises from the practical necessity of precise measurements on the sky or a circle,…
Recently it has been discovered that on a stone tablet over 3800 years old, the Plimpton-322 table, are carved the geometric relations that exist between the sides of 15 right triangles chosen in a very special way. Due to its property as a…
Late-Babylonian mathematics (450-100 BC), represented by some 60 cuneiform tablets from Babylon and Uruk, is incompletely known compared to its abundantly preserved, well-studied Old-Babylonian predecessor (1800-1600 BC). With the present…
Ever since it was published by Neugebauer and Sachs in 1945, the Old Babylonian tablet known as Plimpton 322 has been the subject of numerous studies leading to different and often conflicting interpretations of it. Overall, the tablet is…
We will discuss about a possible method of using the cubit rod by the architects and the surveyors of Ancient Egypt to measure and draw lengths, comparing it with the other interpretations present in Literature. Instead of the modern…
Pythagoras' theorem, the area of a triangle as one half the base times the height, and Heron's formula are amongst the most important and useful results of ancient Greek geometry. Here we look at all three in a new and improved light, using…
Trigonometry is the study of circular functions, which are functions defined on the unit circle $x^2+y^2 =1$, where distances are measured using the Euclidean norm. When distances are measured using the $L_p$-norm, we get generalized…
Multiplication and exponentiation can be defined by equations in which one of the operands is written as the sum of powers of two. When these powers are non-negative integers, the operand is integer; without this restriction it is a…
Pebbles (calculos in Latin) are the "bits" used in the Ancients' four function calculator / computer. The Ancient Computer's normal mode is to work with numbers in what we would call exponential notation. Decimal numbers can have up to 10…
We investigate ``shell structure'' from Babylonian times: periodicities and beats in computer-simulated lunar data corresponding to those observed by Babylonian scribes some 2500 years ago. We discuss the mathematical similarity between the…
A mathematically and culturally natural modification of Evart Bruins' explanation of the genesis of the numbers on the Old Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 gives an economical accounting for the "missing pairs" in his reconstruction. When the…
Pythagorean triples are the positive integer solutions to the Pythagoras equation for right triangles, a2+b2 = c2. They have been studied for many years, many centuries in fact. In this short paper we present a method for computing…
We explore a novel link between two seemingly disparate mathematical concepts: Egyptian fractions and fractals. By examining the decomposition of rationals into sums of distinct unit fractions, a practice rooted in ancient Egyptian…
The Pythagorean Theorem has been proved in hundreds of ways, yet it inspires fresh insights through geometry and trigonometry. In this paper, we offer a new proof based on three circles that circumscribe the sides of a right triangle.…
We discuss the babylonian method of extracting the root square of a number, from the point of view of modern mathematics. We also speculate that the babylonian mathematics was rich enough for a generalization of this method, despite the…
Noticing that all of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries treatments of trigonometry surveyed in this article are conceptually or logically defective, it is required to seek a conceptually sound and logically correct foundations of the…
This article studies three-dimensional objects and their volumes in Elamite mathematics, particularly those found in the Susa Mathematical Tablet No.\,14 (\textbf{SMT No.\,14}). In our discussion, we identify some basic solids whose volumes…
This article discusses the reasons for the choice of the sexagesimal system by ancient Sumerians. It is shown that Sumerians chose this specific numeral system based on logical and practical reasons which enabled them to deal with big…
How were surfaces evaluated before the invention of the sexagesimal place value notation in Mesopotamia? This chapter examines a group of five tablets containing tables for surfaces of squares and rectangles dated to the Early Dynastic…