Abstract We trace the origins of trigonometry to the Old Babylonian era, between the 19th and 16th centuries B.C.E. This is well over a millennium before Hipparchus is said to have fathered the subject with his ‘table of chords’. The main piece of evidence comes from the most famous of Old Babylonian tablets: Plimpton 322, which we interpret in the context of the Old Babylonian approach to triangles and their preference for numerical accuracy. By examining the evidence with this mindset, and comparing Plimpton 322 with Madhava's table of sines, we demonstrate that Plimpton 322 is a powerful, exact ratio-based trigonometric table.

中文翻译：

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Plimpton 322 是巴比伦精确六进制三角函数

摘要 我们将三角学的起源追溯到公元前 19 世纪和 16 世纪之间的旧巴比伦时代。据说在喜帕恰斯用他的“和弦表”创立了这一学科之前，已经过了一千​​年。主要证据来自最著名的古巴比伦石板：Plimpton 322，我们在古巴比伦三角形方法及其对数值准确性的偏好的背景下对其进行了解释。通过以这种心态检查证据，并将 Plimpton 322 与 Madhava 的正弦表进行比较，我们证明了 Plimpton 322 是一个强大的、精确的基于比率的三角函数表。