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.
Pythagoras CANCELLED for ACADEMIC PLAGIARISM
3 hours later
“Pythagoras issues an apology video for stealing his crowning achievement from a piece of clay”
Was he playing a ukulele?
Harpe
“All aboard the clay tablet train”
Tablet man sues Pythagoras for IP infringement
How do I pronounce 17 arrows pointed in different directions? click click clack?
Telephone router noises, the universal language
This is from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Three hours after that
“Justice Department launches investigation into accusations of missing persons in the Pythagorean Cult compound.”
I can hear this headline in Buzzfeed, Fox, and HuffPost fonts.
“It was just parallel thinking, bro…”
Could’ve sworn there were already other instances of people discovering before Pythagoras even before this.
There are.
You sir, win the internet today.
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.
Romes navy during the punic wars was basically a boss that always had another stage you would have to beat
And the final stage came years after the previous one had already beaten Carthage because they had the audacity of continuing to be more successful than Rome (in richness of the city), so they had to go back and completely destroy it and enslave the population that was left after the siege. And by destroy it, I mean they literally burned down the wooden parts and carried off the stones that couldn’t be burnt and forbade anyone to make a new city in that location.
Honestly it’s stuff like that that makes me wonder if I’d rather live in a warlord country like Rome back in the day or live in the boring dystopia that is becoming amarica today
We’ve supposedly just rediscovered how to make Roman concrete in the last few years!
Time flies so I thought it was longer. Thanks for the reminder!
We are haven’t figured out how to make Damascus Steel
if you’re an idiot, you’re one of the best I’ve seen yet
We’re discovering this fungus that breaks down plastics and I’m wondering… How many times have we independently invented plastic?
With the required manufacturing tools and source materials, probably not a lot of times.
Manufacturing? Like this? [Antikythera Mechanism on Wikipedia] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism)
Or this? Metalworking in pre-Columbian America (Do scroll down to the South America section)
Or just like… waves broadly The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC,…If that fungus (or the wax worm for that matter) was more widespread at any point in the last 40,000 years, we just wouldn’t know about any use of plastics.
We have phylogenetic techniques to interpolate when certain genes might’ve appeared in evolutionary history. Not surprisingly, the ability to breakdown plastics is quite new.
Not only that, but the very few microorganisms that can degrade some plastics only express those enzymes under extreme pressure, when no other sources of carbon are available. Literally every sugar is a better alternative than plastic, as the process of degrading it is massively inefficient.
Making a usable polymer out of the absolute insane mixture that is crude oil is also way beyond what any human civilization could ever achieve without industrialization.
I get your point of “but we did amazing things in the past! look at the complexity of steel!” but artificial plastic polymers is in another league.
crude oil
tree oil and formalinAlso my point is not “we were so awesome”, it’s “why do we think every generation before us was a drooling caveman”
why do we think every generation before us was a drooling caveman
We do not. But there’s a massive jump in logic from the idea that we could handle bronze versus we could make plastic.
And once again, the biological portion of your statement makes no sense.
The process is significantly more complex for plastic, not comparable to metalworking
The closest comparable material is variants of wax
oh, hundreds
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I wasn’t being serious.
That’s very hard to tell, and that’s on you.
I’m comfortable with that.
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
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.
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.
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.
Everyone learns something new everyday. How often have you seen a TIL and thought, “doesn’t everyone know that”
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
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.
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.
There is debate whether the Pythagorean theorem was discovered once, or many times in many places, and the date of first discovery is uncertain, as is the date of the first proof. Historians of Mesopotamian mathematics have concluded that the Pythagorean rule was in widespread use during the Old Babylonian period (20th to 16th centuries BC), over a thousand years before Pythagoras was born.[68][69][70][71]
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:
The history of the theorem can be divided into four parts: knowledge of Pythagorean triples, knowledge of the relationship among the sides of a right triangle, knowledge of the relationships among adjacent angles, and proofs of the theorem within some deductive system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I do choose weird hills to fight on, don’t I?
Let me try this another way, this time with less sarcasm.
- 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.
- 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?
Why not reduce the posting rate, and take the time to just write a short enticing description instead?
Laziness
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.
If you start talking about irrationality to a cult you’re kinda asking for it. sqrt(2) is a beautifully irrational number!
and the proof is very elegant - you could explain it to a (smart) elementary school kid
Not gonna lie, that’s extremely comical and on par for pre-early modern humanity
From what I recall from learning about who Pythagoras was as a person he really liked talking things out while sailing
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.”
I completely missed that, that’s great!
“Fuck Mexicans” - Pythagoras
His whole theorem was for the sole purpose of building a wall.
Oh so now I get why he yelled “I’ll make amarica great again” no one understood until a orange man ran for president
The dude hated beans so much, he got killed by pursuers in front of a bean field because he refused to touch them
Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, they’re funny cause they’re true!
Middle schoolers certainly curse him
Being an ancient Greek man I bet the boys would curse him even more if they met him.
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)
I have had dreams about Laplace transform, they were nightmares, but not as bad ones as the classes.
And don’t get me started on Fermat and his silly margin note joke.
One of the rare moments on teh intarwebz where it comes in handy I read Fermat’s Last Theorem :D
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You encouraged me to go look him up on Wikipedia. The history and legend of Pythagoras is some crazy shit apparently
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.
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
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.
a god that we worshipped
Would they be wrong? What’s the line between idolization and worship?
I would argue praying to them and doing acts in their name. Although that last part could be twisted.
👏 Dear Harambe…
“Non-existent man publicly called out for misappropriating clay tablet.”
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.
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?
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.
There’s a copy of Wikipedia on the moon and the orbiting Tesla. With a shelf live of a few billion years.
Luckily the moon is a quick day-trip away in case we return to sticks and stones.
The point being it’s for a humanity that recovered scientific progress in a place techno-barbarians cant ruin or, failing that, others 👽
Unless you’re a contemporary, you’ll just be a story.
Source? Seems like Wikipedia thinks he existed.
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?
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.
This!
“Let no one’s work evade your eyes, just plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize. But always please call it research.” – Tom Lehrer (Lobachevsky)
Next to it: “First!”
I haven’t seen a comment like that in years. I bet there’s a whole slew of users (lemmies? What exactly are we called here?) Who have no clue what you’re talking about.
we’re lemmings. I’ll be the one with the pickaxe, you can be the one with the parachute
Hey as long as we’re all part of the same team.
Babylon: Based 60
Time travel
Maybe. It could also be that this proves that the Babylonians were a hoax.
I don’t think that’s accurate
Omg! I didn’t know Pythagoras taught at Harvard
He was Francesca Gino’s research assistant
I’m fat. I saw a rib roast at first.
It’s legend that Babylon was destroyed most likely taking all of that knowledge with it. I’m surprised that this tablet survived.
Nah. There’s heaps of Babylon tablets in existence. Most of them very mundane - how much beer was fed to your slaves last month, how many goats were born, that sort of thing.
Scribes usually kept tablets damp so the clay was still supple enough to take an imprint from a reed (cuneiform) but often the stuff we find archeologically is the burned remains of buildings which have been built over later - but in the burning the tablets have been “fired”.
Sorry but no…Babylon came to crisis quite quickly having two major times, when society and culture developed. Even the there are cultural and religious references to Babylon as far from 1st century BC. So, Babylon wasn’t destroyed at all, came towards the end for the exact reason of all civilizations of middle east and orient at the time: internal struggles and bad actions from kings
Those are the same reasons that nearly every civilization in history ended because of. It is much more common for great civilizations to collapse from internal pressures than it is for them to be conquered.
