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Pythagorean Theorem Found On Clay Tablet 1,000 Years Older Than Pythagoras
(www.iflscience.com)
Pythagoras CANCELLED for ACADEMIC PLAGIARISM
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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“Pythagoras issues an apology video for stealing his crowning achievement from a piece of clay”
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literally 90% of human history has gone unrecorded, and what has been recorded usually gets destroyed, ransacked or deliberately destroyed, Caligula's pleasure barges, Tower of Babel, Library of Alexander. Humans have tried to keep knowledge retained. and some people take that personally.
remember when ISIS was at its peak they were just destroying artifacts like it was a kid in a candy store. And that's just been in the 35 years I've been alive.
when Rome fell it took another century for civilization to rediscover the technology and applied lessons used then.
and im a dumb idiot, I'm just making a broad skim, if you could ask a historian they'd likely tell you all the things humans have lost, purposefully destroyed or forgotten along the way.
It's even more amazing than that in the case of Rome. To cite just one example, by the time of Constantine I in the mid-300s CE, Rome could support armies totaling 650,000 men. The logistics and organization required to do that are staggering. After the fall of Rome, it would take until the time of Napoleon's Grand Armee in the early 1800s before numbers like that were fielded again. Even today, there are relatively few countries with an active military force of that size. They weren't just sitting around either. Rome was always fighting someone. It speaks to the ability of ancient peoples to organize and support truly massive endeavors and sustain them over literal centuries. I mentioned Napoleon's Grand Armee earlier. It was large, but it only lasted for about 5 years.
So, yes, a ton of technology was lost for a long time, both physical and social/organizational.
And during the second Punic war, when Rome mostly just controlled the Italian boot, Hannibal ravaged the peninsula for a decade but Rome just kept raising more armies to fight them. You could say that war wasn't very well understood at that time (like Hannibal was very good at battles, but couldn't turn that dominance into its own advantage), but it's still crazy to me that Rome just had an enemy army just roaming around, surviving on plunder and foraging, destroying the armies Rome sent to oppose it, but otherwise Rome was still able to function as a state to the point where they could raise, organise, equip (actually, they might have had to equip themselves at this point, I think the Empire providing that was one of the innovations they later started), train, move, and feed armies despite it.
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We've supposedly just rediscovered how to make Roman concrete in the last few years!
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Ah yes the Claytablorean Theorem
Are you saying that IM67118 Theorem is not recognized?
Recognized or not, I will be wondering if Pythagoras was actually the Edison of his time....
I have no doubt he discovered it independently and just knew better how to articulate its importance.
According to the article, the theorem was named for him out of respect for starting a school-society thing whose members in turn developed & popularized the theorem. So you should perhaps have at least some doubt
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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.
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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.
Everyone learns something new everyday. How often have you seen a TIL and thought, "doesn't everyone know that"
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.
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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.
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?
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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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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Who curses Pythagoras?
Pythagoras said you shouldn't eat beans. Fuck him, I need my burritos.
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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I'm an idiot, no doubt about that, but fellas I gotta' say ancient Babylonian writing looks an awful lot like you just hit something with a weed whacker. Are we SURE?
Cool stuff but god damn I miss RedditIsFun showing me what links are before I opened them. I'm currently in bed next to my sleeping wife and that video was suddenly very loud.
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Reminds me of the mediaeval nun who erased a manuscript by Archimedes who was laying out the basics of calculus long before it was formally "invented" by Newton and Leibnitz because she needed space to write prayers.
How do you erase a manuscript
It was on parchment I believe, it was pretty common in the middle ages to scrape the ink off those and reuse them.
For anyone interested, that's called a palimpsest.
a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.
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"Let no one's work evade your eyes, just plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize. But always please call it research." -- Tom Lehrer (Lobachevsky)
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