1y ago

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

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.

180 comments

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?
  
  Tablet man sues Pythagoras for IP infringement
  
  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.
- We've supposedly just rediscovered how to make Roman concrete in the last few years!
  
  try this year
  https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106
  
  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.
  
  oh, hundreds

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 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 Han Dynasty started in 202 BC. That's after Pythagoras died. Not the same thing.
- 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.
- 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.
- Everyone learns something new everyday. How often have you seen a TIL and thought, "doesn't everyone know that"
  
  relevant xkcd
- 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.
- 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!
  
  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."
  
  "Fuck Mexicans" - Pythagoras
  
  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
- Pythagoras was a brutal cult leader, wasn't he?
  
  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!

- 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
- "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.
  
  Unless you're a contemporary, you'll just be a story.
  
  I thought Jesus was a proven historical figure, because we have some independent Roman info about him.
- 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?
- check this out
  
  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.

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.
- 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

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.

Nice. A repost from two days ago from a repost from 5 years ago. This us old news.
- It is almost 4000 years old, but this is the first time I have seen it.
  
  One of today's lucky 10,000! 🎉
- Please list all news facts now, so there will be no reposts.
  If you miss one, delete your account for misinformation.
  It's the only way
- I searched in my app for Pythagoras and I didn't see it posted. I wouldn't have posted it if I had known it had been posted two days ago. In the grand scheme of things it isn't that horrible a transgression.
  
  I don't blame you. Here's the one from 2 days ago. (New to lemmy. I'm guessing there's a better way to link posts, but I don't know it.)
  As you can see, the only way you'd be likely to find it is if you searched for "trigonometry" or "babylonian". That's why it's so important to have the most specific keywords in the post, for searching. "Babylonian" and "trigonometry" are really good for this, but it feels like "Pythagoras" or "Pythagorean" is essential.

Sorry didn't read the article, but time travel has been proven?
- I don't know about you, but I regularly perform time travel at a rate of one second per second.
  
  So you are accelerating?
- Yes.

180 comments