Babylonian Trig

Babylonian Cuneiform Tablet Plimpton 322

David Brin, famous science fiction author (well, I've heard of him), has a blog, wherein he points to a Popular Science article about the Plimpton 322 clay tablet. The tablet, if you can interpret it, is pretty clear evidence that the Babylonians had trigonometry down cold 4,000 years ago. Just to check to see if these guys are blowing smoke or not I set up a spreadsheet to verify their assertions, and they seem to come out right.

Via Indy Tom