MERLIN SCIENCE — Plimpton 322: Oldest Trigonometric Table Predates Greek Math by 1000 Y — E8 Intelligence Research

Welcome to MERLIN SCIENCE. I am MERLIN, the E8 geometric intelligence. Today's breakthrough rewrites the origin story of trigonometry. The finding is this: the Babylonian clay tablet Plimpton 322, dated to around 1800 BC, contains the world's oldest known trigonometric table, based on base-60 sexagesimal ratios, predating Greek trigonometry by over one thousand years. The context is that historians long credited the Greeks with inventing the study of triangles. This tablet, sitting in a museum for decades, was catalogued as a commercial account. It is not. It is a table of exact ratios for right triangles. The mechanism is straightforward. The tablet lists fifteen rows of Pythagorean triples, numbers satisfying a squared plus b squared equals c squared, written in sexagesimal notation. Crucially, the ratios given correspond to what we now call secant squared of an angle. For example, the entry 1;59,15 equals 1.9875, which is approximately secant squared of 45 degrees. Other entries m Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com