Plimpton 322

<Tab/>Plimpton 322 is a cuneiform clay tablet with the catalog number 322 in the G.A. Plimpton Collection at Columbia University. Probably the most well known mathematical tablet, it was written in the Old Babylonian period between 1900 and 1600 B.C.E. and shows the most advanced mathematics known before the development of the Greek mathematics. It was originally thought that Plimpton 322 was one of many tablets that recorded inventories of food and merchandise. However, in 1946 Otto Neugebauer and A. J. Sachs, historians of mathematics, discovered that the numbers in the…