It predates Pythagoras by over 1,000 years.

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.

    • JoshRW@lemmy.world
      37·
      1 年前

      You encouraged me to go look him up on Wikipedia. The history and legend of Pythagoras is some crazy shit apparently

      • KreekyBonez@lemm.ee
        30·
        1 年前

        damn. why did schools only teach the super boring part about the triangles. dude had the golden thigh of apollo and the super-speed of hermes.

        also, it really sounds like he was a cult leader.

      • neuracnuEnglish
        22·
        1 年前

        No shit… these are like old Chuck Norris facts:

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras

        the priest of Apollo gave Pythagoras a magic arrow, which he used to fly over long distances and perform ritual purifications

        A fragment from Aristotle records that, when a deadly snake bit Pythagoras, he bit it back and killed it.

        he once convinced a notoriously destructive bear to swear that it would never harm a living thing again, and that the bear kept its word

        • Bread@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          10·
          1 年前

          Kinda makes you wonder if future archeologists would know the difference between the jokes being jokes about chuck Norris vs us believing he was a god that we worshipped. Maybe that’s all mythology is, some running gags that everyone took seriously.

    • jarfil@lemmy.world
      20·
      1 年前

      Will any of our writings be found in 2500 years? Are we a myth…?

      It seems to be a case similar to Socrates, or Jesus. Nice how Pythagoras was supposed to perform miracles, and stay a month “dead” just to later come back to life.

      • StarDreamerEnglish
        25·
        1 年前

        The year is 5123. We have meticulously deciphered texts from the early 21st century, providing us with a wealth of knowledge. Yet one question still eludes us to this day:

        Who the heck is Magic 8. Ball?

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 年前

        Will any of our writings be found in 2500 years?

        The media on which our electronic data is stored have lifespans measured in just years. Everything that the Internet consists of right now, unless it’s endlessly copied forward, will be lost.

          • Elohim@lemm.ee
            2·
            1 年前

            Luckily the moon is a quick day-trip away in case we return to sticks and stones.

        • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
          8·
          1 年前

          Sort of. Tacitus, for example, mentions his execution a hundred years later but his cult was relatively popular, spreading throughout the Jewish diaspora, having a notable presence in Rome itself, and presumably played a part in a massive rebellion in Judaea. Of course, a lot of the Roman sources could also be fabricated references, but Tacitus’s is considered reliable.

          There isn’t a document saying “Pilate had this dude executed today” but there are sources saying “That dude Pilate executed back in the day has a cult and they’re being annoying.”

          So yes, there almost certainty was a cult leader that was executed and his followers believed he was divine, or at least started saying he was within a couple decades of his death, but we, for example, don’t even have a primary source that his name was Yeshua. We mostly know for certain that people worshipped a guy named Yeshua a century after his probable death.

          But history is funny, and cults are weird.

          It’s not impossible, for example, a man with a cult named something too “ethnic” for Greeks and Romans to pronounce was stabbed by a Roman by the side of the road. They scatter and start telling everyone about how a soldier of Pilate martyred their God, it becomes a crucifixion over time where a soldier stabs him in the side, and everyone gives up on correcting people that his name wasn’t “Josh” and just rolls with it because at least they’re getting the “Christ” title right.

          But we don’t have a source for that version, so you can broadly assume a dude named Jesus was baptized by John, crucified by Pilate, and these were reliable events even if everything else isn’t.