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Pythagorean Theorem Found On Clay Tablet 1,000 Years Older Than Pythagoras (www.iflscience.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/news@lemmy.world
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Study math for long enough and you will likely have cursed Pythagoras's name, or said "praise be to Pythagoras" if you're a bit of a fan of triangles.

But while Pythagoras was an important historical figure in the development of mathematics, he did not figure out the equation most associated with him (a2 + b2 = c2). In fact, there is an ancient Babylonian tablet (by the catchy name of IM 67118) which uses the Pythagorean theorem to solve the length of a diagonal inside a rectangle. The tablet, likely used for teaching, dates from 1770 BCE – centuries before Pythagoras was born in around 570 BCE.

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[–] 79 points 2 years ago* (7 children)

Study math for long enough and you will likely have cursed Pythagoras's name, or said "praise be to Pythagoras" if you're a bit of a fan of triangles.

What? Why? @Salamendacious@lemmy.world would you care to elaborate? Who curses Pythagoras? Fourier? Sure! Laplace? Fuck that guy AND the goat he rode in on! And don't get me started on Fermat and his silly margin note joke. But Pythagoras?

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Unless OP actually wrote this article, they aren't saying that. The post text body is literally just the first two paragraphs of the article.

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  • [+] -18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If OP actively copied it, and doesn't give any indication that it's plagiarized from the article, then OP can damn well defend it.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I mean....do you not click on the comments sections of articles here? Standard practice is to copy some or all of the article to the text body of the post. I feel like maybe you either need more or less coffee/tea today. Take a deep breath my dude.

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  • [+] -10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    do you not click on the comments sections of articles here

    Clearly I do.

    Standard practice is to copy some or all of the article to the text body of the post

    In that case I don't follow the standard of stealing content when I post something.

    I feel like maybe you either need more or less coffee/tea today. Take a deep breath my dude.

    Why is everyone telling me to relax? I WILL NOT RELAX!!1!one! /s

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't follow the standard of stealing content when I post something.

    It's not stealing, it's putting some of the info in the post. Most people aren't going to actually read the article, so for those people, posting some/all of the body of the article gets them to actually read what was posted.

    Why is everyone telling me to relax? I WILL NOT RELAX!!1!one! /s

    I know you put the sarcasm tag on there, but this is a weird fucking hill to die on, pal.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I do choose weird hills to fight on, don't I?

    Let me try this another way, this time with less sarcasm.

    1. The websites we link to generate revenue by displaying ads. If we copy the important parts of the articles, and put them on lemmy with the link, then, as you also brought up, people won't want to read the original article as well. That results in fewer views and less revenue for the author. Is it the same as holding a gun to the author's face and robbing them? Of course not. But I also don't think it's fair to the author either.
    2. It's copyright infringement. Plain and simple infringement. If you copy all the relevant parts and don't offer additional content, like commentary, then the fair use clause is really hard to argue. How copyright attorneys are going to handle getting content taken off the feddiverse is a different thing, but it is still copyright infringement.

    Why not reduce the posting rate, and take the time to just write a short enticing description instead?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why not reduce the posting rate, and take the time to just write a short enticing description instead?

    Laziness

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    ooooh that's a bingo!

    I'm sorry, I promised no more sarcasm.

    Now I don't have a problem with laziness, but when someone's laziness becomes disrespectful and rips people off, then I believe that we should try to do better. Or at least not expose our instance of choice to IPR liabilities.

    Maybe I'm being a pedant. That we can argue, and I'll give you a head start by agreeing with you. But I refuse to believe that I'm also wrong.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Eh, most of the entities that get fucked by posting the article in the text body, I couldn't give two shits about. Also no one is getting ad revenue off me, ads can be an attack vector for malicious code, they're also annoying. I agree you're being a pedant, that's what I like about you. I do think you're wrong though. That said, I feel like we can agree to disagree, and leave it at that.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    who curses pythagoras?

    At the very least that one guy who got drowned for blasphemy by the pythagoras cult, because he proved that the hypotenuse of a triangle with a base of 1 is an irrational number.

    Also to be fair I imagine more people are cursing Euler for having his name stapled to half of every theorem and proof it seems.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Who curses Pythagoras?

    Pythagoras said you shouldn't eat beans. Fuck him, I need my burritos.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yes, but that led to my absolute favorite joke in Moby-Dick: the fart joke in chapter 1. (It's important to remember that the "Pythagorean Theorem" is A²+B²=C², but the "Pythagorean maxim" is 'Don't eat beans.')

    "For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle."

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    "Fuck Mexicans" - Pythagoras

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's all relative, someone who never touched on Fourier or Laplace might see Pythagoras or trigonometry as the peak of mathematics and something very difficult. There will be some hardcore mathematicians that dream in Laplace...(shudders)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Pythagoras was a brutal cult leader, wasn't he?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    Considering that we're somewhere on a scale going from "We're not really sure Pythagoras was even an actual person" to "Pythagoras was a brutal cult leader". My stance will be that the theorem is useful, and that Fermat, Fourier, and Laplace, apart from being French (which is bad enough to begin with), also made math hard on me in university, at least the last two. Fermat was just a dick with that margin note. Curses on all three of them!

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