"Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter’s position from the area under a time-velocity graph" / Mathieu Ossendrijver
Abstract
The
idea of computing a body’s
displacement as an area in time-velocity
space is usually traced back to 14th-century Europe. I show that in four
ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets, Jupiter’s displacement along the
ecliptic is computed as the area of a trapezoidal figure obtained by
drawing its daily displacement against time. This interpretation is
prompted by a newly discovered tablet on which the same computation is
presented in an equivalent arithmetical formulation. The tablets date
from 350 to 50 BCE. The trapezoid procedures offer the first evidence
for the use of geometrical methods in Babylonian mathematical astronomy,
which was thus far viewed as operating exclusively with arithmetical
concepts.
BBC Report
Sophisticated geometry - the branch
of mathematics that deals with shapes - was being used at least 1,400
years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests.Previously, the origins of this technique had been traced to the 14th Century.
The new study is published in Science.
Its author, Prof Mathieu Ossendrijver, from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, said: "I wasn't expecting this. It is completely fundamental to physics, and all branches of science use this method."
For the rest of the BBC report, see:
