Where Did the Ancient Babylonians Get Trigonometry?

Most Bible believers know there was a flood of global proportions during the days of Noah.  If you count back the generations from Abraham to Noah we can determine that the flood happened about 4000 years ago.

If we then count forward to the time when men started to build the Tower of Babel, we would come up with a date somewhere 200-300 years after the flood waters dried up.

So how do you suppose the men attained the knowledge necessary to believe they could challenge God?

It's interesting to ponder what the New York Times article is saying in light of biblical knowledge.

Hints of Trigonometry on a 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Tablet

Suppose that a ramp leading to the top of a ziggurat wall is 56 cubits long, and the vertical height of the ziggurat is 45 cubits. What is the distance x from the outside base of the ramp to the point directly below the top? (Ziggurats were terraced pyramids built in the ancient Middle East; a cubit is a length of measure equal to about 18 inches or 44 centimeters.)

Could the Babylonians who lived in what is now Iraq more than 3,700 years ago solve a word problem like this?

Two Australian mathematicians assert that an ancient clay tablet was a tool for working out trigonometry problems, possibly adding to the many techniques that Babylonian mathematicians had mastered.

 

“It’s a trigonometric table, which is 3,000 years ahead of its time,” said Daniel F. Mansfield of the University of New South Wales. Dr. Mansfield and his colleague Norman J. Wildberger reported their findings last week in the journal Historia Mathematica.

 

(If you need help to solve the problem, the answer is explained below.)

The tablet, known as Plimpton 322, was discovered in the early 1900s in southern Iraq and has long been of interest to scholars. It contains 60 numbers organized into 15 rows and four columns inscribed on a piece of clay about 5 inches wide and 3.5 inches tall. It eventually entered the collection of George Arthur Plimpton, an American publisher, who later donated his collection to Columbia University. With all the publicity, the tablet has been put on display at the university’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

The other three columns are much more intriguing. In the 1940s, Otto E. Neugebauer and Abraham J. Sachs, mathematics historians, pointed out that the other three columns were essentially Pythagorean triples — sets of integers, or whole numbers, that satisfy the equation a² + b² = c².

 

This equation also represents a fundamental property of right triangles — that the square of the longest side, or hypotenuse, is the sum of the squares of the other two shorter sides.

That by itself was remarkable given that the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, for whom the triples were named, would not be born for another thousand years.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/science/trigonometry-babylonian-tablet.html

We also know that ancient Babylon is where Nimrod and all the satanic cults seem to have originated.

We also know that the Bible has much to say about the destruction of Babylon (satanic cults, idol worship, false religions, etc...) in the very last days.

So as you read this article and read your Bible.....you can scratch your chin and say, "Hmmmmm....?"