“The clay tablet with the catalog number 322 in the G. A. Plimpton Collection at Columbia University may be the most famous mathematical tablet from ancient times. It was scribed in the Old Babylonian period and shows the most advanced mathematics, more than a thousand years before the development of Greek mathematics. It is unique. No other tablets like it have been found, in contrast to many “school” tablets of reciprocals and mathematical problems found in abundance.
Plimpton 322 is known throughout the world to those interested in the history of mathematics as a result of the work of Otto Neugebauer, chair of Brown University’s History of Mathematics Department. In the early 1940’s he and his assistant Abraham Sachs discovered that it contained Pythagorean triples, integer solutions of the equation a2 + b2 = c2.”
