Plimpton 322 refers to a mysterious Babylonian clay tablet featuring numbers in ceneiform script in a table of 4 column and 15 rows. Eleanor Robinson, a historian of science, refers to it as "one of the world's most famous mathematical artifacts. " Written around 1800 B.C., the table lists Pythagorean triples- that is, whole numbers that specify the side lengths of right triangles that are solutions to the Pythagorean Theorem a^2 + b^2 = c^2. For example, the numbers 3, 4, and 5 are Pythagorean triple. The fourth column in the table simple contains the row number. Interpretations vary as to the precise meaning of the numbers in the table, with some scholars suggesting that the numbers were solutions for students studying algebra or trigonometry-like problems.
Plimpton 322 is named after New York publisher George Plimpton who, in 1922, bought the tablet for $10 from a dealer and the donated the tablet to columbia University. The tablet can be traced to the Old Babylonian civilization that flourished in Mesopotamia, the fertile valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which is not located in Iraq. The unknown scribe, who created Plimpton 322, lived within about a century of King Hammurabi, famous for his sets of laws that included "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
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