- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.ml
- science@beehaw.org
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.ml
- science@beehaw.org
- news@lemmy.world
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
And the Romans probably perfected it! Look at all those angles!
![A picture of an Old Latin inscription, featuring lots of angled letters.](https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_archaiclatin.gif)
But of course, pi and other “circle stuff” would need to wait until scribes writing on paper with all those round letters.
Now being serious, I think that it’s possible that the Babylonians didn’t even discover it, but learned it from someone else. The Sumerians already used squares and rectangles extensively and had good maths, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to find a relationship between the distance of two opposite corners of a rectangle vs. the size of the sides of the rectangle, specially since this stuff has practical applications.