1608
Pythagorean Theorem Found On Clay Tablet 1,000 Years Older Than Pythagoras
(www.iflscience.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
1608 points (99.0% liked)
News
23397 readers
4108 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I thought it was well established that Pythagoras didn't actually derive his namesake theorem?
It is. There's evidence of its use in the Old Babylonian period, evidence in 1800 B.C.E Egypt, India in 700-500 BCE, China during the Han Dynesty at least.
It's very simple to prove, and anywhere you find squares or triangles in architecture, it was used.
I'm assuming it was discovered multiple times independently. Pythagorean is just the one that wasn't forgotten.
The Romans built off of Greek culture, Europe built off of Roman culture, the US built off of European culture. US math is very much based on Greek math (and US education in general). You may remember doing Greek proofs in school. Greek math was by no means superior to any other culture's, it just so happens that US culture descends from Greek culture.
But thank the gods we adopted Hindu-arabic numerals.
ssshh don't tell the republican bigots they are using terrorist numerals ;) /s
We do, then we film the results and laugh.
Then wonder why the r u r a l s don't like city folk.
to be fair, being "city folk" vs. being "rural" doesn't really qualify as an excuse for different levels of education. if it is the case anywhere (and admittedly it seems to be) that's a testament to the need for improvement of the education system.
Availability of schools and ability (or willingness) to pay for good teachers very much does correlate to levels of education available in different places.
You're not wrong. Nasty negative feedback loop :(
Pretty sure the Summarians were doing astronomy, they probably had all sorts of geometry figured out.
At some points it was "superior". Elements was used as a textbook throughout Europe and the Arab world, because it was one of the first and few books with rigorous proofs. If course it was probably compromised of previous works, but there was really nothing else like it.
The Han Dynasty started in 202 BC. That's after Pythagoras died. Not the same thing.
My point was they likely used it independently.
It's a matter of debate whether he discovered it independently or not, though we've known he wasn't the first for a while.
People can re-invent and re-discover things. It still happens all the time in this day and age of worldwide massive communications. I'd be surprised if the right angle theorem didn't get discovered thousands of times throughout history.
Everyone learns something new everyday. How often have you seen a TIL and thought, "doesn't everyone know that"
relevant xkcd
Someone here is seeing this xkcd for the first time just now...
This is my favourite xkcd
Edit: I gotta say it should be 380000 though, because it should be applied to the world instead of being US centric
Browsing the wikis, I got the impression research is unconclusive. We don't know if he had a role regarding the theorem, and what it was.
The German version also talks about the various roles Pythagoras might have had or not had regarding the theorem, and how research is unconclusive. One such possibility is that this older Clay Tablet applied the theorem without being able to prove it, and Pythagoras or one of his students could have found a proof.
Also:
So there were lots of meaningful steps one could achieve without actually deriving the theorem. Maybe people were happy to just use math because it works, and a thousand years later someone bothered to prove why.