As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...

Archaeologists, with help from artificial intelligence, have finally decoded 4,000-year-old writing on ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets predicting doom that have remained untranslated for over a ...

Dr. Stephanie Dalley, an expert on the ancient cuneiform texts, is one of a handful of people who can read this language which dates back to the Babylonian era. Her translation of the cuneiform on a ...

What it tells us about the past: This round clay tablet, which is in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, is one of two dozen examples of ancient Babylonian mathematics ...