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So what did the ancient Babylonians ever do for us? Well apparently they gave us complex geometry, the branch of mathematics that deals with shapes. New research suggests that Babylonian astronomers in what is now Iraq used geometry to track the path of Jupiter some 1,400 years before the technique was reinvented in fourteenth century Europe. The discovery is described in the journal Science by German astrophysicist and historian Professor Mathieu Ossendrijver: (Picture: Babylonian tablet showing sophisticated geometry markings / Credit: Mathieu Ossendrijver)