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ลำดับตอนที่ #14 : Ancient Babylonians 'first to use geometry'
Ancient Babylonians 'first to use geometry'
Sophisticated geometry - the branch of mathematics that deals with shapes - was being
used at least 1,400 years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests.
Research shows that the
Ancient Babylonians were using geometrical calculations to track Jupiter across
the night sky.
Previously, the origins
of this technique had been traced
to the 14th Century.
The new study is
published in Science.
Its author, Prof Mathieu
Ossendrijver, from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, said: "I
wasn't expecting this. It is completely fundamental to physics, and all branches of
science use this method."
Stargazers
The Ancient Babylonians
once lived in what is now Iraq and Syria. The civilisation emerged in about
1,800 BC.
Clay
tablets engraved
with their Cuneiform
writing system have already shown these people were advanced in astronomy.
"They wrote reports about what they saw in the
sky," Prof Ossendrijver told the BBC World Service's Science in Action
programme.
"And they did this over a very
long period of time, over centuries."
But this latest research shows they
were also way ahead when it came to maths.
It had been thought that complex
geometry was first used by scholars in Oxford and Paris in Medieval times.
They used curves to trace the position and velocity of moving
objects.
But now scientists believe the Babylonians developed this technique around 350 BC.
Prof Ossendrijver examined five Babylonian tablets that were excavated in the 19th
Century, and which are now held in the British Museum's archives.
The script reveals that they were
using four-sided shapes, called trapezoids, to calculate when Jupiter would appear in the night
sky, and also the speed and distance that it travelled.
"This figure - a rectangle with a slanted top - describes how the velocity of a planet, which is Jupiter, changes with time," he said.
"We have a figure where one axis, the horizontal side, represents time, and the other axis,
the vertical side,
represents velocity.
"The area of trapezoid gives you
the distance travelled by Jupiter along its orbit.
"What is so special is this type
of graph is unknown from antiquity
- so making figures of motion in this rather abstract space of velocity against
time - this is something very, very new."
He added that there was evidence that
the Greeks used a "more straightforward" form geometry, which dealt
with the spatial
relationships between the Earth and the planets rather than the concepts of
time and velocity.
Prof Ossendrijver told the BBC that
it was unclear how common this technique was.
"It could be that there was an
earlier tablet, written by a genius, by one individual, who came up with this
new way of doing astronomy.
"It could also be that in fact this is a method that was more widely applied by different scholars. We don't know."
having a good understanding of the
way people behaveand/or a good knowledge of culture and fashion:
intelligent or made in a complicated way and therefore ableto do complicated tasks:
Trace
(v.)
to discover the causes or origins of something by examiningthe way in which it has developed:
Stargazers
(n.)
a person who is involved in astronomy or astrology
Clay
(n.)
thick, heavy soil that is soft when wet, and hard when dry or baked, used for making bricks and containers
engrave
(v.)
to cut words, pictures, or patterns into the surface of metal, stone, etc.:
Cuneiform
(adj.)
of a form of writing used for over 3,000 years until the 1st century BC in the ancient countries of Western Asia
pointed at one end and wide at the other:
related to the Middle Ages (= the period in European historyfrom about AD 600 to AD 1500)
velocity (n.)
the speed at which an object is travelling:
tablets
(n.)
a thin, flat, often square piece of hard material such as wood, stone, or metal:
excavated
(v.)
to remove earth that is covering very old objects buried in the ground in order to discover things about the past:
to dig a hole or channel in the ground, especially with a machine:
trapezoids,
(n.)
a flat shape with
four sides,
none of which are parallel
US mathematics a flat shape with four sides, where two of the sides are parallel
Slanted
(adj.)
sloping in one direction› disapproving showing information about one person, one sideof an argument, etc. in such a positive or negative way that it is unfair:
axis,
a real or imaginary straight line going through the centre of a object that is spinning,
or a line that divides a symmetricalshape into two equal halves:
a fixed line on a graph used to show the position of a point:
horizontal
(Adj.)
parallel to the ground or to the bottom or top edge of something:
vertical
(adj.)
standing or pointing straight up or at an angle of 90° to a horizontal surface or line:
orbit.
(n.)
the curved path through which objects in space movearound a planet or star:
antiquity
(n.)
the distant past (= a long time ago), especially before the sixth century
object that was created a very long time ago:
spatial
(adj.)
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