The Global Skills Gap Widens as U.S. Students Struggle
Babylonians school most of us in math while the UN warns that entry to the modern economy is getting tougher.
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The weekly journal Science features on its new cover a Babylonian tablet that calculates Jupiter's movement through the sky. The archeological find pushes the discovery of a rudimentary calculus back at least 1,400 years, from 14th century Europe.
Advisers to Babylonian kings were recording two facts—the passage of time and Jupiter's velocity—to project where the giant gas orb might pop up next. A more sophisticated version of the same analysis, painfully known to many as integral calculus, lets you look a year ahead from today's stock price and come up with the value of options.