Babylonian Geometry

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As we began to see in the previous section’s readings, the Babylonians could solve many different kinds of problems. In some ways, their methods were more advanced than the Egyptian methods. We would like to study (or look again at) the ways the Babylonians approximated square roots, how they solved quadratic equations, and several different kinds of geometry problems. Again, with material that is repeated in more than one place, it’s good to pay attention to the different opinions of different authors!

Readings

First Reading: Read Section 1.6: Three Babylonian Mathematical Texts

Second Reading: Ancient Babylonian Astronomers Calculated Jupiter’s Position from the Area Under a Time-Velocity Graph

Third Reading: Pythagoras’s Theorem in Babylonian Mathematics

Questions

The time interval over which the ancient Babylonians made observations about the position of Jupiter was how many days long? $\answer [given]{60}$ days.

Which of the following is not a challenge when translating ancient Babylonian tablets?

We do not know the ancient Babylonian language. Some parts of the documents are broken off or missing. Scribes occasionally made errors when copying documents. Tables of numbers are not usually labeled with their purpose.