YBC 7289

Common card · No. 487950

YBC 7289 is a Babylonian clay tablet notable for containing an accurate sexagesimal approximation to the square root of 2, the length of the diagonal of a unit square. This number is given to the equivalent of six decimal digits, "the greatest known computational accuracy ... in the ancient world". The tablet is believed to be the work of a student in southern Mesopotamia from some time between 1800 and 1600 BC.

Read on Wikipedia · Image Urcia, A., Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, http://peabody.yale.edu, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/8931zqj derivative work, user:Theodor Langhorne Franklin, CC0