Babylonian mathematics

Babylonian clay tablet YBC 7289 with annotations. The diagonal displays an approximation of the square root of 2 in four sexagesimal figures, 1 24 51 10, which is good to about six decimal digits.1 + 24/60 + 51/60 + 10/60 = 1.41421296... The tablet also gives an example where one side of the square is 30, and the resulting diagonal is 42 25 35 or 42.4263888... Babylonian mathematics (also known as Assyro-Babylonian mathematics) is the mathematics developed or practiced by the people of Mesopotamia, as attested by sources surviving mainly from the Old Babylonian period (1830–1531 BC) to the Seleucid period from the last three or four centuries BC. With respect to content, there is scarcely any difference between the two groups of texts. Babylonian mathematics remained constant, in character and content, for over a millennium.

In contrast to the scarcity of sources in Ancient Egyptian mathematics, knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is derived from hundreds of clay tablets unearthed since the 1850s. Written in cuneiform, tablets were inscribed while the clay was moist, and baked hard in an oven or by the heat of the sun. The majority of recovered clay tablets date from 1800 to 1600 BC, and cover topics that include fractions, algebra, quadratic and cubic equations and the Pythagorean theorem. The Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 gives an approximation of