Geometry at Night #science #math #geometry #poem

Cuneiform tablets

A holy city worshiped bulls

Two thousand years ago

And gave the world astrology

Or so the story goes.

Masters of geometry

They watched the sky at night

Saw stars that moved in retrograde

And puzzled at the sight.

Movements of the planets

Produce a twisted dance

They charted it with dents in clay

They had no proper graphs.

Geometry was once supreme

Before the calculus

Trapezoids drawn in the sky

For brains that functioned thus.

by Kate Rauner

Geometry is different – I’ve noticed that some people connect with geometry even if other forms of math leave them cold.

Astroarchaeologist Mathieu Ossendrijver, of Humboldt University in Berlin, has deciphered cuneiform tablets that predicted the planet Jupiter with fancy geometry found nowhere else in the ancient world.

“Ancient Babylonians used a complex geometrical model that looks like a rudimentary form of integral calculus to calculate the path of Jupiter. Scientists previously thought this mathematical technique was invented in medieval Europe.” livescience.com

“Trapezoid calculations were a tool for calculating Jupiter’s displacement each day along the ecliptic, the path that the sun appears to trace through the stars. The computations recorded on the tablets covered a period of 60 days, beginning on a day when the giant planet first appeared in the night sky just before dawn… Learning how the Babylonians astronomers acquired their geometric acumen ‘would tell us something about why human beings do science in the first place, and from time to time do it very well indeed.'” sciencemag.org

Filed under: Poetry Tagged: anthropology, astroanthropology, Babylon, cuneiform, geometry, math, mathematics, science