Plimpton 322

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Plimpton 322 is a Babylonian clay tablet, believed to have been written around 1800 BC, that contains a mathematical table written in cuneiform script. Each row of the table relates to a Pythagorean triple, that is, a triple of integers ( s , l , d ) {\displaystyle (s,l,d)} that satisfies the Pythagorean theorem, s 2 + l 2 = d 2 {\displaystyle s^{2}+l^{2}=d^{2}} , the rule that equates the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle to the square of the hypotenuse. The era in which Plimpton 322 was written was roughly 13 to 15 centuries prior to the era in which the major Greek discoveries in geometry were made. At the time that Otto Neugebauer and Abraham...

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