Geoffrey Anderson
History of Math
9/15/14
Cultural Essay 2: Babylonians
The Babylonians where a very sophisticated group of people. They contributed greatly to
Mathamatics by forming a place value holder. This had not been seen before in history. There
mathematical system had a base 60, which is similar to ours which has a base 10. They wrote
using soft clay and a stylus which later hardened allowing us to view 100s of their writings. They
did not have a number equivalent to 0 so instead they left a large gap between their writings.
They knew how to multiply and had multiplication tables up to 60 however there is no record of
them using addition. Historians assume they knew how to add because of how they did their
multiplication. They also had fractions which came in base 60 which would be 1/60 1/60^2 and
so on.
This is somewhat impressive to me because in school we would only learn multiplication
tables up to 12 while they learned theirs up to 60. It is interesting to see how similar our methods
are to theirs. These people where some of the first to think of a place holder. Before them the
Egyptians had a system of base 10 however they did not have a very good place holder and
multiplication was done by doubling instead of the way we are firmilar with today. The where a
large civilization which clearly needed math and this seems like a very efficient way of doing it.