The square tablet, known as Plimpton 322, is roughly the size of a cell phone and features four columns and 15 rows of cuneiform numbers written on it. Artifacts dealer Edgar Banks—the man who Indiana Jones is based off of— sold the 3,700-year-old artifact to New York publisher George Arthur Plimpton in 1923, and it was discovered near the ancient city of Larsa in Iraq. In the early 1940s, Brown University mathematics historian Otto Neugebauer studied Plimpton 322 and concluded that the rows and columns of numbers formed parts of Pythagorean triples, or three numbers that provide a solution to the equation a2 + b2 = c2. The number series 3,4,5 is a popular “triple” example, and it’s also the equation used to describe the dimensions of right-angle triangles.