🪐 Ancient Babylonians were doing calculus 1,400 years before Europe.

Between 350 and 50 BCE, Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter's position by computing the area under a time-velocity curve - treating the planet's changing speed as a trapezoid on a graph. Historians thought this technique wasn't invented until 14th-century Oxford.

The tablets sat untranslated in the British Museum for over a century until Mathieu Ossendrijver cracked them in 2016.

#history #science #astronomy
nationalgeographic.com/science…

Babylonians Tracked Jupiter With Advanced Tools: Trapezoids

Ancient tablets describe math that was thought to have been invented over 1,000 years later, rewriting the history books.

^{Michael Greshko (National Geographic)}