A viral multiplication spiral once attributed to Nikola Tesla opens the door to a much older mathematical story, one rooted in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian base-60 mathematics. In this episode, we explore how sexagesimal counting shaped everything from clocks and geometry to modern science, and how ideas are often misnamed after the most famous figure rather than the original innovator. Along the way, we unpack eponymy, the Matthew Effect, and why credit in science and math is rarely distributed fairly.
Learn:
🌀 Why Base-60 Still Runs Our World
How the Sumerian sexagesimal system underpins timekeeping, angles, geography, and trigonometry, and why it survived for thousands of years.
📐 The Truth Behind "Tesla's" Multiplication Map
Where the multiplication spiral actually comes from, how it visually encodes multiples of 12 and 60, and why attributing it to Tesla is mathematically unnecessary.
📚 Eponymy, the Matthew Effect, and Who Gets Credit
From Fibonacci to Pythagoras, Rosalind Franklin to Vera Rubin, we examine how scientific ideas are routinely named after the wrong people and what that reveals about power, prestige, and history.
Featured Concepts & Figures
· Sexagesimal (base-60) number systems
· Sumerian and Babylonian mathematics
· Tesla's Multiplication Map vs. the Sumerian Sexagesimal Spiral
· Eponymy and Stigler's Law
· The Matthew Effect and the Matilda Effect
· Pythagorean triples and Plimpton-322
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Selections from The Little Prince by Lloyd Rodgers
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