In this assignment, we did a presentation on Babylonian multiplication and division. While the provided information on Babylonian arithmetic seemed to be quite understandable and straightforward, the process of bringing everything together to make a presentation was more challenging then what we had imagined.
The first challenge was to figure out the non-existing decimal place in Babylonian mathematics. We started the project before the class where Babylonian reciprocal table was introduced, so I had to figure out why the pairs in the reciprocal table do not always multiply to 1. Despite many documentations on the Babylonian reciprocal table, few directly pointed out the missing of ways to represent different decimal places. Through researching and trying to do multiplication from the pairs, this concept eventually became clear. It is interesting how some resource makes assumptions about facts that are not necessarily evident to the audience. When reading such documents, the best way is to try it out with paper and pencil by ourselves.
Through this presentation, I had a deeper understanding of the operations in Babylonian times, as well as other ancient math concepts from the presentation of other groups. The group work part made it more interesting because we can get different perspective from our group members. It is a fun and rewarding assignment!
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