You just thought you didn’t like math, but we’re finding it was used in many ways by the ancients to help us to attain the standing that we have now in many different sciences. From astronomy to space travel to sailing, geometry is a useful tool. In a hugely shocking modern way, it was used by the ancients to chart the movement of planets–or.. non planets–as it were.
The original story is here:
Babylonians used geometry to track Jupiter’s movements
Ancient Babylonians charted Jupiter’s heavenly motion in a surprisingly modern, mathematically abstract way — a feat that until now was thought to have originated among European scholars who lived roughly 1,400 years later.
Analyses of cuneiform writing on four largely intact clay tablets show that innovative geometric calculations enabled ancient astronomers to track the giant planet’s movement across the sky, Mathieu Ossendrijver reports in the Jan. 29 Science. These tablets were excavated more than a century ago and are now housed at the British Museum in London.
Researchers did not document exactly where these and thousands of other clay tablets were uncovered in 19th century excavations in Iraq. But most scholars today consider tablets from those digs that contain astronomical tables and calculations to have been found in Babylon, the ancient capital of Babylonia, says Ossendrijver, a historian of ancient science at Humboldt University of Berlin. Based on previous age estimates for other Babylonian tablets dealing with mathematical astronomy, the geometry-bearing tablets were probably written between 2,366 and 2,066 years ago, he says.
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