My thoughts on the two articles of Babylonian Numerics

In my mind, an hour is always a circle (same as a regular clock) and time is measured in 15 minutes or a quarter of a circle. After reading the Lombardi's article, I was surprised that an hour was not a empirically constant unit of time measurement. It made logical sense that people treated day and night as separate entities where each had 12 hours. It's suggested that Hipparchus introduced 24-hour day around 147 B.C., so people over a millennium had to work out the seasonally varying length of an hour. Another surprising snippet was the usage of clepsydra mentioned in Lombardi's article. This is a fascinating way where fluid dynamics is used as a substitute as sun light or lack of during night.

Lombardi stated in his article that the base 60 was first invented by Sumerian, which then passed down to Babylonian, which then passed down to Greek. However, the reason of 60 was unknown. In O'Connor and Roberston's article, they had a different hypothesis about the reason of a base-60 system. A person can learn to count to six by counting 12 using one hand (thumb to count 12 joints of other finger) and then 5 using the other hand. My view is that O'Connor and Roberston's theory makes sense since ancient counting without any tools solely relies on human's hands. 

Comments

  1. Erica HuangSeptember 17, 2024 at 4:25 PM

    Thanks for the thoughtful reflection, Raymond. Interesting observation that you associate the concept of an hour with the physical shape of the clock. As a practicing teacher, I've noticed that over the years, more and more students are unable to read the analog clock as they are so used to reading time from their phones. I wonder how that affects students' concept of an hour!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My thoughts on the Market Scale Problems

Image
I first started on the one-pan scale problem first using 5 weights to sum up from 1 to 31. The trial and error process began with trying out sum of weights for the first few whole numbers. Since I know the highest number achievable should be 31, having two weights both using 1 is irrational. Hence, I started with the first two weights as 1 and 2 and was able to reach 3 through that. For next whole number of 4, I instinctively assigned the third weight as 4 and was able to reach whole number of 7. The problem begins to look like a combinations of weights using exponents of 2. Using this rationale, I assigned fourth and fifth weight as 8 and 16 respectively which the sum of five weights are 31. I knew then that the solution is a series of exponents of 2. I proceeded to validate this solution accordingly. Moreover, each weight has a binary status of 0 and 1, so the total combination is 2^5-1 which also comes out to be 31. Next, I worked on the two-pan scale problem with only 4 weights to ...
Read more

My reflection on group Math History project

Image
Our assignment group was responsible for presenting Ahmes' loaf sharing problem, which was a problem created for entertainment purposes in ancient Egypt. It had two conditions: 1) 100 loaves for 5 men, with the allocations being an arithmetic progression, and 2) 1/7 of the 3 largest portions combined equals the 2 smallest portions combined. For the presentation, we discussed the context leading up to the problem, organized a toy example activity, discussed our modern and ancient solutions, and proposed an alternative strategy as our extension. Click here to access the presentation slides Pictured: Ahmes' loaf sharing problem in the style of an ancient Egyptian mural For the background, Raymond was responsible for looking into the ancient Egyptian mathematical developments that were necessary for the solving of this problem and presenting the problem description to the class. As for Zain, he was responsible for researching and presenting the solution that would've been possi...
Read more

My Final Reflection on EDCP 442

This has been a wonderful journey to learn about a rich side of Math which I thought really little about. While Susan has structured the course in the chronological order of past civilizations, it was eye-opening to see how capable ancient people were in using mathematics to aid their lives. Learning the intricacies of the base 60 system in Babylonian math and its relationship to time was fun. I still remember that the 24-hour system was introduced as early as around 147 BC Hipparchus. As someone who grew up only knowing base 10 and base 2 systems, I never thought about how base 10 is just a construct instead of an empirical truth. Another aspect of the class I enjoyed was also the recognition that math history and contributions have been largely euro-centric. The progression of the course focusing on other non-European history was helpful and insightful for someone who came from a Chinese background. Math problems have also been a challenge as an ELL student in the past. Seeing ho...
Read more