A mathematician from the University of New South Wales in Australia has found that a 3700-year-old tablet, which was earlier believed to be “teacher’s list of school problems,” is actually the oldest example of applied geometry. The tablet was originally discovered in the 19th century and has been in a museum in Istanbul for nearly a century. The tablet - named Si.427 - was originally discovered in what is now central Iraq.

“The discovery and analysis of the tablet have important implications for the history of mathematics," said Daniel Mansfield, the author of the study, in a statement. The study was published on August 3 in Foundations of Science.

According to the researcher, the new analysis revealed that the calculations and the diagrams on the hand-tablet indicate that it was probably used by a surveyor to make calculations about a piece of land that was being sold. Interestingly, the hand-tablet, which appears to be written using a stylus, uses a mathematical concept that we now know as Pythagoras triplets. Pythagoras triplets are the three sides of a right-angled triangle in which the sum of the squares of the smaller sides equals the square of the largest side. However, the calculation used in the tablet is nothing like what we do in modern trigonometry, using sin, cos and tan ratios. For this reason, researchers have assigned the name “proto-trigonometry” to the system used by the tablet.

Mansfield, along with his colleague from UNSW Norman Wildberger, had previously analysed another tablet from the same era that described right-angled triangles using Pythogorus triplets.

3700-Year-Old Tablet Found in Iraq Earliest Example of Applied Geometry: Study

New analysis revealed that the calculations and the diagrams on the hand-tablet indicate that it was probably used by a surveyor to make calculations about a piece of land.