FINDING: Plimpton 322 is an Old Babylonian trigonometric table based on exact sexagesimal ratios of sides in right triangles, not modern angles or the golden ratio. | MATH: The tablet lists 15 rows of Pythagorean triples (a, b, c) with a² + b² = c², using base-60 (sexagesimal) fractions. The ratios b² / (c² - b²) or (c² - a²) / a² form a decreasing sequence of regular sexagesimal numbers (e. g. , 1;59, 15, 1;56, 56, 58, 14, 50, 6, 15, etc. ). No explicit golden ratio (φ ≈ 1. 618) or its reciprocal (0. 618) appears in the tablet's numbers. The triples correspond to sec² (θ) or tan² (θ) values for angles from about 45° down to 30°, using exact reciprocals of regular numbers in base-60. | CONNECTION: No direct geometric harmony with φ, 0. 382, 0. 618, 0. 786, 2. 618, or crystallographic symmetries. The base-60 system is used, but the ratios are not golden-ratio-based. The tablet's structure aligns with a trigonometric table of squared secants (or tangents) for angles in a 15° range, not harmonic Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence. com
Andrew Stewart Caldin (Wed,) studied this question.