The 3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York. An ancient Babylonian tablet whose purpose has been a longstanding mystery ...

For a text that may rewrite the history of mathematics, it looks rather sloppy. The brown clay tablet, which could fit in the palm of your hand, is scrawled with hasty, highly abbreviated cuneiform ...

Tucked away in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions. First exhumed in 1894 from what is now ...

Thankfully, very few of us have to bother with trigonometry on a daily basis, but regardless of how much you may have dreaded studying it (or any math, for that matter) in school, it’s still ...

This clay tablet written around the year 1800 B.C.E. may represent the oldest known use of trigonometry UNSW / Andrew Kelly A new analysis of a long-studied Babylonian tablet suggests that ...

For people living in the ancient city of Babylon, Marduk was their patron god, and thus it is not a surprise that Babylonian astronomers took an interest in tracking the comings and goings of the ...

The astronomers of Babylonia, scratching tiny marks in soft clay, used surprisingly sophisticated geometry to calculate the orbit of what they called the White Star -- the planet Jupiter. (Mathieu ...

Eric Mack has been a CNET contributor since 2011. Eric and his family live 100% energy and water independent on his off-grid compound in the New Mexico desert. Eric uses his passion for writing about ...