Ancient Babylonians 'first to use geometry'

Research shows that the Ancient Babylonians were using geometrical calculations to track Jupiter across the night sky.
Previously, the origins of this technique had been traced to the 14th Century.
The new study is published in Science.
Its author, Prof Mathieu Ossendrijver, from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, said: "I wasn't expecting this. It is completely fundamental to physics, and all branches of science use this method."
Stargazers
The Ancient Babylonians once lived in what is now Iraq and Syria. The civilisation emerged in about 1,800 BC.
Clay tablets engraved with their Cuneiform writing system have already shown these people were advanced in astronomy.

This figure - a rectangle with a slanted top - describes how the velocity of a planet, which is Jupiter, changes with time

Prof Mathieu Ossendrijver, Humboldt University of Berlin

"They wrote reports about what they saw in the sky," Prof Ossendrijver told the BBC World Service's Science in Action programme.
"And they did this over a very long period of time, over centuries."

Culled from the internet