Geometric division problems, quadratic equations, and recursive geometric algorithms in Mesopotamian mathematics (Q2435325)

The author has for a long time been interested in the oldest mathematical texts from Mesopotamia; he contributed important insights to their decipherment and interpretation. In this paper, he comes back to some topics on which he has worked before, mostly in geometry. Much of it was already contained in his book [Amazing traces of a Babylonian origin in Greek mathematics. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing (2007; Zbl 1180.01001)]. The texts discussed are arranged roughly in chronological order. The details cannot be repeated here; suffice it to mention some examples. The author assumes that very early texts recording ``almost round numbers'' are not administrative but rather school exercises in calculating and using measures. He also suspects school exercises in several other tablets without explicit administrative context, and proposes procedures that would have made use of the particular properties of the numbers involved. A recurrent topic is the ``field expansion procedure''. It intends to produce a rectangle (or trapezoid) of a given area by starting from another rectangle of known sides and area and by appropriately adding small amounts to both sides. Since the texts do not show any calculations but just the results, interpreting them requires some ingenuity on the part of the modern scholar. The author then turns to problems which lead to quadratic equations. The first one (p. 11 ff.) just shows a drawing of a trapezoid of which all sides are known; a transversal is also drawn, but without an indication of length. Obviously, the question was how to find the length of this transversal. The author shows how it could have been done by methods of Old Akkadian times. Trapezoids are a frequent topic of Babylonian mathematical texts, and the author discusses several examples of dividing or combining them. Especially noteworthy are ``recursive algorithms'', in which results of one step are used as data for the next step.