Plimpton 322: a review and a different perspective (Q642097): Difference between revisions

The tablet Plimpton 322 was published more than 60 years ago; nevertheless, discussion about it continues, as can be seen from two recent interpretations which differ significantly [\textit{E. Robson}, ``Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Babylon. A reassessment of Plimpton 322'', Hist. Math. 28, No. 3, 167--206 (2001; Zbl 0991.01001); \textit{J. Friberg}, A remarkable collection of Babylonian mathematical texts. Berlin: Springer (2007; Zbl 1125.01001), 431--451]. In a first part, the authors address two insufficiently answered questions: (1) where do the numbers on the tablet come from and what principle governed their selection and organization; (2) How were the numbers computed and what does this imply about the author's approach to the exercise and understanding of the relationships involved? These questions are answered as follows: Triples of \(\beta , 1, \delta\) (representing the shorter side, the longer side, and the diagonal of a rectangle) were computed from ratios \(r/s\) of regular numbers as \(\beta=1/2(r/s-s/r)\), \(\delta=1/2(r/s+s/r)\). The text intended that \(r/s\) would satisfy the conditions \(1 < r/s < 1+\sqrt{2}\), and \(1 \leq s < 1,0\). In the second part of the article, the authors first review the evidence for the tablet's provenance and consider it likely that it came from Larsa. They then proceed to interpret the text as ``a coherent \textit{mathematical} project'' to generate a ``list of all the rectangles with length equal to 1 and width and diagonal finite sexagesimal numbers''. They base this on comparison with several texts from roughly the same time and provenance, some of them only recently published. Beyond the text's possible pedagogical use for the construction of school exercises, as proposed several times in the literature, the authors see it as a mathematical undertaking based on the discovery of the connection between the Diagonal Rule (what is called Pythagorean Theorem in modern terminology) and the method of completing the square to solve problems of second degree. It is thus an important piece of \textit{mathematics}, from the first half of the second millennium B.C.