Babylonian mathematics refers to any mathematics of the peoples of Mesopotamia美索不达米亚 (modern Iraq) from the days of the early Sumerians苏美尔人 through the Hellenistic希腊化的 period almost to the dawn of Christianity. The majority of Babylonian mathematical work comes from two widely separated periods: The first few hundred years of the second millennium BC, and the last few centuries of the first millennium BC. It is named Babylonian mathematics due to the central role of Babylon as a place of study. Later under the Arab Empire, Mesopotamia, especially Baghdad, once again became an important center of study for Islamic伊斯兰教的 mathematics.
In contrast明显的差异、对比 to the sparsity稀少 of sources in Egyptian mathematics, our knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is derived获得 from more than 400 clay tablets unearthed since the 1850s. Written in Cuneiform script楔形文字, tablets were inscribed刻 whilst the clay was moist湿润的, and baked hard in an oven or by the heat of the sun. Some of these appear to be graded homework.
The earliest evidence of written mathematics dates back to the ancient Sumerians, who built the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia. They developed a complex system of metrology度量衡学 from 3000 BC. From around 2500 BC onwards, the Sumerians wrote multiplication tables乘法表 on clay tablets and dealt with geometrical exercises and division problems. The earliest traces痕迹、踪迹 of the Babylonian numerals also date back to this period.
Babylonian mathematics were written using a sexagesimal六十进制 (base-60) numeral system. From this derives the modern-day usage of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 (60 × 6) degrees in a circle, as well as the use of seconds and minutes of arc to denote fractions of a degree. It is likely the sexagesimal system was chosen because 60 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. Also, unlike the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, the Babylonians had a true place-value system, where digits written in the left column represented larger values, much as in the decimal十进制的 system. The power of the Babylonian notational system lay in that it could be used to represent fractions as easily as whole numbers整数; thus multiplying two numbers that contained fractions was no different than multiplying integers整数, similar to our modern notation. The notational system of the Babylonians was the best of any civilization until the Renaissance文艺复兴, and its power allowed it to achieve remarkable computational与计算相关的 accuracy; for example, the Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 gives an approximation近似值 of √2 accurate to five decimal小数的 places. The Babylonians lacked, however, an equivalent of the decimal point, and so the place value of a symbol often had to be inferred from the context. By the Seleucid period, the Babylonians had developed a zero symbol as a placeholder占位符 for empty positions; however，it was only used for intermediate positions. This zero sign does not appear in terminal positions; thus the Babylonians came close but did not develop a true place value system.