Word: babylonian
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...every schoolchild used to know, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. But in the electronic age, the ancient Babylonian constant -- or rather the accurate calculation of its value -- has become a symbol of computational prowess. In the 1950s the U.S. led the way, churning out estimates of pi accurate to thousands and tens of thousands of decimal places. Then the French took the lead. With the emergence of Japan's supercomputer industry in the 1980s, pi has become an almost exclusive province of the Japanese. The last world record, 201 million digits...
...Hades, and mine this day was no exception. Heading downtown, I boarded one of the system's older trains -- creaking, crotchety and covered with indescribable graffiti. I looked closer at one cluster of squiggles, spray-painted by the ubiquitous Taki 183. Was it . . .? Could it be . . .? Yes, there in Babylonian script were the opening words of the Gilgamesh Epic...
...tablets most likely date back to the Old Babylonian period of Mesopotamia, Bottero said. The area between the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq is often referred to as the cradle of civilization...
...They are recipes and as such practically a unique genre that one simply has not encountered before in cuneiform literature," said Hallo, a professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature at Yale...
Yale recently celebrated the 75th anniversary of its Babylonian collection, which contains about 40,000 items...