Pythagorean Theorem Found On Clay Tablet 1,000 Years Older Than Pythagoras
Pythagorean Theorem Found On Clay Tablet 1,000 Years Older Than Pythagoras
www.iflscience.com
Pythagorean Theorem Found On Clay Tablet 1,000 Years Older Than Pythagoras
84 comments
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I knew Pythagoras was smart but I never knew he invented time travel. So cool!
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This makes a strong case on the discovery side of the discovery vs. invention controversy.
Ironically, my dad idolized Pythagoras and the notion of discovering a scientific fundamental to be remembered for thousands of years, for which the secret is not to actually do science, but raise a cult of scientists who attribute their inventions to you. Like Thomas Edison.
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It was most of the Greeks. We credit Democritus with atomism even though the Greeks said it came from an earlier Phoenician, Mochus of Sidon. Even Democritus's teacher doesn't get credit.
Democritus wrote it down in a way that survived.
That's it.
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Not really. The Pythagorean theorem (or whomever you want to credit for it) assumes plane geometry. It’s not true in general.
Plane geometry is the invention that makes all of the math work. The earth is not a flat plane (not even close to flat pretty much anywhere). If you want to do Pythagorean-like calculations between cities on earth, for example, you’ll get a much more accurate result with spherical geometry operating on geodesics. Unfortunately, spherical triangles not obey the Pythagorean theorem!
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🎶 They say Thomas Edison he’s the man to bring us into this century
And that man is me…
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Cool but is there a better source on this than "I fucking love science"?
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https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jt.2009.16
This paper was sourced in the article
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Cuneiform scripts were frequently coppied by scribes, so the theorem could be even older
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A handful of people can be credited with discovering the theorem prior to Pythagoras, this isn't the first time this has come up, and incidentally there is almost no evidence to suggest Pythagoras did.
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I think that this theorem is at least as old as the pyramids.
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I bet Pythagoras had substandard copper too
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Pythagoras has superior copper. All other thagoras has inferior copper.
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People used to live longer back then, just look at the bible.
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another nail in whitey's coffin. when will this woke history end
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Pythagoras wasn't white. 😎
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and another nail in whitey’s coffin. when will this woke history end
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I don't know, this painting of him looks pretty white (please ignore that it was made in the 1920s by an American who had probably never been to Greece)
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Isn't this common knowledge that the Indians knew the theorem well before Pythagorus?
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Given what other comments are saying about him (cult leader appropriating works of others), I think the west/europe would do well not to associate themselves with him.
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Yes and also I have a hard time believing the builders if the great pyramid didn't understand it in some capacity either. They just didn't have symbolic algebra to express it the way we do .
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There are mentions of pythagorian triplets in pyramid era Egypt, and in all fairness, ancient Greeks didn't have symbolic algebra either - it is a fairly recent form of expression.
And, as far as I know, ancient Indians were actually writing mathematical expressions in full prose form - word problems et al.
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This is one of the reasons why we shouldn't name things after people.
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This, and the fact that most stuff is invented by teams and not individuals. I think our tendency to name after a single person helps keep the hero/savior/Messiah complex of western society alive, and blinds us to the power of community and cooperation. It's like "individual-washing" the past.
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I feel like at this point I've seen this story in 1,000 year old reposts.
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What a classic situation. Some hype man taking credit.
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It always seemed weird to me that it would be formally developed so late. Like I've taken multiple trigonometry courses and can't even define trigonometry let alone make sense of most of it, but the Pythagorean theorem is a purely intuitive thing everyone does regularly. The first person to take a diagonal shortcut while walking understood it. It should have been the first thing mathematics codified after basic arithmetic.
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There is lots of evidence of the Pythagorean theorem before Pythagoras. The attribution of the rule to him comes centuries after he lived. So likely he worked on codifying and proving the relationship using the Greek deductive and axiomatic system.
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I imagine it's been developed and lost periodically, and some people are averse to irrational numbers. Greece just had continual credit in our intellectual pedigree (as opposed to, say, the Babylonians who had more advanced trig than the Greeks before them and the Greeks were aware of them in some ways).
I think you also need a lot of rectangles and squares to find it necessary. I imagine buildings, but even today a lot of materials are cut to fit (also, the building I am in is not rectangular along any dimension). Maybe legal rectangular plots of land? Idk
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And garden of eden as well as the story with a baby in a basket in Nil, are already in Atrahasis epos, from which Gilgamesh epos copied btw.
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people joined a cult because of this theorem. that must be awkward
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yah but pythagoras is the new bob
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Ok so
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because understanding the history of our technology gives anthropologists a better way to determine what we were capable of in our earliest stages of civilization. because understanding the history of us is important to understanding who we are. do you really not see the value in knowledge?
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Wut?
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Someone is lost!
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84 comments
What I would like to know is if tablets like this are being scanned digitally into three dimensions so that they can be reproduced. I feel like everything we find from antiquity needs to be scanned this way. With humans constantly going to war destroying history, I'd hate the idea of losing things like this forever.
UPDATE: And thus a journey down the interwebs rabbit hole begins. I need better internet and PC to check this out more later, but answering my own question, here's the entrance to the rabbit hole should others wish to venture with a few examples:
Didn’t all kinds of antiquities get destroyed in Iraq? Totally irreplaceable stuff.
As you alluded, probably common in many places. How sad.
Most recently I remember it happening really really badly within Syria. Very intentional destruction. But yes, it happens all the time--Iraq included. With the technology we have now, we can preserve a lot of it (digitally at least).
I hate how it's so damn hard to find these things and yet so easy to destroy it.
A lot was destroyed but a lot of it was looted and and sold to sleazy collectors. Remember when the guy who owns Hobby Lobby got caught buying looted artifacts?
Still horrible, obviously, but at least there’s some hope looted items will be recovered.
Yea ISIS and other extremist groups like to destroy evidence of their ancestor’s greatness for some reason.
Lesser sons of lesser sons
Oh man.
It's only recently that the idea of "archaeology" has been a thing. Before then there were only "antiquarians" which were just looters.
Often they had royal backers. There's a podcast series called "stuff the British stole"
There's pretty well documented instances in the 1800s in Egypt, and pompeii.
Honestly the amount of amazing stuff that has just been "collected" is just eye watering.
There's also the https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/about Obviously, losing a dimension isn't great but still pretty cool