Plimpton 322

Beginning of the 19th century were excavated approximately half a million clay tablets of the Babylonians, about 400 of these panels scientists are involved with mathematics. The best known of these panels is now in the GA Plimpton Collection at Columbia University and has the number 322

The panel was created between 1800 BC and 1650 BC and contains a table with four columns and 15 rows filled with the Babylonian numerals their cuneiform. 1945, the researcher Otto Neugebauer found out that this is to Pythagorean triples, which means that the Babylonians knew the significance of these figures already 1000 years before Pythagoras.

Although the meaning of the board has been known for, its benefits lie in the dark. A new conjecture of Eleanor Robson of the University of Oxford says that teachers could easily write new tasks for their students with the help of the table, without having to recalculate every time.