A Babylonian student worked out the square root of two to six decimal places.
The school tablet YBC 7289, from 1800–1600 BC, shows a square with its diagonals and the value 1.414213, off by less than one part in two million.
More amazing facts
- 1800 BC The oldest beer recipe was written as a hymn to a goddess.
- 1800 BC · 530 BC Babylonians tabulated 'Pythagorean triples' more than a thousand years before Pythagoras.
- 1754 BC · 44 BC · 313 About 1,710 years passed between Hammurabi's laws and Caesar's assassination — nearly as long as separates us from the Edict of Milan of 313.
- 1754 BC · 1700 BC As Hammurabi was carving his laws, North Americans were piling up giant earthworks.
- 1750 BC The oldest known customer complaint, from around 1750 BC, is about bad copper.
- 1600 BC · 2002 The oldest known depiction of the night sky was recovered in a police sting in Basel.