Excerpt:
Plimpton 322 is part of a baked clay tablet made in Babylon between 1900 and 1600 BC, probably found at Senkereh in the 1920's,and now in the G.A. Plimpton Collection in Columbia University Library, New York. It is the oldest preserved document on number theory. It is written in cuneiform script using sexagecimal notation. It was first deciphered by Neugebauer and Sachs in 1945. It lists 15 Pythagorean triples and is the complete classification of such triples under certain hypotheses. The lecture will describe the tablet and explain the underlying mathematics.