Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry (Q1678024): Difference between revisions

Another attempt to explain how the entries in Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 were generated, how many rows it had (namely 38, not the extant 15), and what its overall purpose was. By the very nature of such reconstructions, everything is purely speculative. The mathematics makes sense, but one has to assume that the missing 23 numbers were those the authors postulate and not those to which \textit{E. Robson} [ibid. 28, No. 3, 167--206 (2001; Zbl 0991.01001)] has arrived. We are told that ``P322 should be seen as an exact sexagesimal trigonometric table text,'' that ``P322 compares favorably with trigonometric tables from 3000 years later'' (with Mādhava's sine table from fourteenth-century India used to prove the superiority of P322 interpreted in the authors' manner), that ``no other explanation has achieved this level of cohesion with the evidence'' and that their interpretation ``significantly elevates the status of Babylonian mathematics.'' In [loc. cit.], Robson pointed out that much of the literature on ancient mathematics is ``deliberately provocative and polemical.'' This one is certainly provocative. Its greatest shortcoming is in the absence of an embedding of P322 in the presumed life of a Babylonian culture of its time, in the narrow view of the tablet as a piece of modern mathematics that needs to be deciphered.