The 3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York. An ancient Babylonian tablet whose purpose has been a longstanding mystery ...

Thankfully, very few of us have to bother with trigonometry on a daily basis, but regardless of how much you may have dreaded studying it (or any math, for that matter) in school, it’s still ...

For a text that may rewrite the history of mathematics, it looks rather sloppy. The brown clay tablet, which could fit in the palm of your hand, is scrawled with hasty, highly abbreviated cuneiform ...

Tucked away in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions. First exhumed in 1894 from what is now ...

An ancient Babylonian tablet whose purpose has been a longstanding mystery reveals that the ancient Mesopotamian civilization beat the Greeks to the discovery of trigonometry by more than 1,000 years, ...

A 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet discovered by the real Indiana Jones has been revealed as the world’s oldest — and most accurate — trigonometric table. Mathematicians believe that the tablet, ...

(CNN) -- Over 1,000 years before Pythagoras was calculating the length of a hypotenuse, sophisticated scribes in Mesopotamia were working with the same theory to calculate the area of their farmland.

Eric Mack has been a CNET contributor since 2011. Eric and his family live 100% energy and water independent on his off-grid compound in the New Mexico desert. Eric uses his passion for writing about ...