Plimpton 322

<Tab/>Plimpton 322 is a cuneiform clay tablet with the catalog number 322 in the G.A. Plimpton Collection at Columbia University. Probably the most well known mathematical tablet, it was written in the Old Babylonian period between 1900 and 1600 B.C.E. and shows the most advanced mathematics known before the development of the Greek mathematics. It was originally thought that Plimpton 322 was one of many tablets that recorded inventories of food and …

…years before Pythagoras' birth! They had no proof for the theorem, but there are ample examples of its use in various problems of that time period. References: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Geometry, pages 321-322, 638, 686-687; 2001 Joyce, David, Plimpton 322 Tablet, Clark University, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, 1995 http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/mathhist/plimpnote.html Otero, Daniel, Plimpton 322, Xavier University, 2000 (modified 1/2002) <Tab/>http://cerebro.xu.edu/math/math300/02s/plimpton2.html