This Ancient Babylonian Map Of Jupiter Just Changed History
A historian has just decoded a mysterious trapezoid from ancient Babylonian astronomical tablets. After analysis of the tablet, it has been concluded that Babylonian astronomers had calculated the movements of Jupiter using an ancient form of geometric calculus. Keep in mind that this is approximately 1500 years before we thought this type of math was invented by the Europeans.
The tablet was translated by astroarcheologist Matthieu Ossendrijver of Humbolt University in Berlin.
As Science Alert points out:
“This means that these ancient Mesopotamian astronomers had not only figured out how to predict Jupiter’s paths more than 1,000 years before the first telescopes existed, but they were using mathematical techniques that would form the foundations of modern calculus as we now know it.”