Plimpton 322: a study of rectangles (Q2152388)

It has been known for a long time that, at least since the Old Babylonian period, Mesopotamian scribes could determine the reciprocal of a regular many-place sexagesimal number incrementally by recognizing trailing digits and factoring them out repeatedly. A sexagesimal number is considered regular if its only prime factors are 2, 3, and 5 so that it has a finite sexagesimal reciprocal. The author suggests that the factoring technique could have been applied more widely than just being used for reciprocals. Most triangles in Mesopotamian mathematics are derived from the sides and diagonal of a rectangle, and so most of them are right-angled. The author introduces the term `diagonal triple' to refer to the lengths of the sides and diagonal of a rectangle, and `normalized' when the length of the long side is taken to be \(1\). Whereas we consider `\(3-4-5\)' to be the canonical Pythagorean triple, in Mesopotamian mathematics the standard normalized triple is `\(45 - 1 - 1,15\)'. The author then turns to the famous Old Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322, arguing that it represents an investigation into rectangles with regular sides using the factorization procedure.