Plimpton 322 Larsa, Mesopotamia Pythagorean triples brute force arithmetic integers
The earliest historical find of an arithmetical nature is a fragment of a table: the broken clay tablet Plimpton 322 (Larsa, Mesopotamia, ca. 1800 BC) contains a list of "Pythagorean triples", that is, integers 



(
a
,
b
,
c
)


{\displaystyle (a,b,c)}

 such that 




a

2


+

b

2


=

c

2




{\displaystyle a^{2}+b^{2}=c^{2}}

.
The triples are too many and too large to have been obtained by brute force. The heading over the first column reads: "The takiltum of the diagonal which has been subtracted such that the width..."
