The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
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Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
#2Expounded in modern publication since at least Weisheit und Wissenschajt: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos, und Platon (1962)
Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
#3Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062020
Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
#4Next up: the shocking discovery of a Vedic interpretation of quantum chromodynamics ;)
https://www.sanskritimagazine.com/vedic_science/quantum-mech...
Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
#5Next up: the shocking discovery of a Vedic interpretation of quantum chromodynamics ;) https://www.sanskritimagazine.com/vedic_science/quantum-mech...
:P
Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
#6Yes, but the point is the approach to proof (proving this for all cases) that represented a paradigm shift in mathematics, largely attributed to Thales.
Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
#7The great man theory almost always fails. The life of Pythagoras is largely myth. This theorem was most likely known and proven well before him. This is old news.
Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
#8Yes, but the point is the approach to proof (proving this for all cases) that represented a paradigm shift in mathematics, largely attributed to Thales.
The earliest known proof of Pythagorean theorem is due to Euclid. It is strange at all that any credit is attributed to Pythagoras, since Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians and Chinese all had discovered this [1]. And Pythagoras did not prove his theorem, to the best of our knowledge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History
Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
#9Yes, but the point is the approach to proof (proving this for all cases) that represented a paradigm shift in mathematics, largely attributed to Thales.
I think this is the most important point modern readers need to make.
If we discover a proof earlier than Thales, regardless of whether it’s Greek, we might revise the discovery of trig. But this is about certain triples being used practically in Babylon (who recorded everything) without any recorded interest in the relationship between triples.
Because Greeks first recorded the important part —- the proof —- I think it’s factual and not at all offensive to refer to Ancient Greek culture as influential in that recorded innovation in geometry.
I’ve seen a movement to broadly give credit to other cultures for Pythagoras, but knowing about triples is just not enough to say that they promoted innovation leading to trig.
Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
#10Yes, but the point is the approach to proof (proving this for all cases) that represented a paradigm shift in mathematics, largely attributed to Thales.
The earliest known proof of Pythagorean theorem is due to Euclid. It is strange at all that any credit is attributed to Pythagoras, since Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians and Chinese all had discovered this [1]. And Pythagoras did not prove his theorem, to the best of our knowledge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History
Also weird that (more generally) Euclid is only rarely mentioned by name, and more often nearly anonymously as the author of Elements. Yet, Pythagoras is named early and often.