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The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

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Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

#71

Post by peterburkimsher »

spoonjim wrote: post #51
tim333 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth Wikipedia has him as a real person living 570 – c. 495 BC, son of Mnesarchus, a gem-engraver on the island of Samos, who travelled to Croton about 530 BC and set up some kind of school there.

It might be the mathematical equivalent of Winston Churchill... a person who definitely existed, but who didn’t say 90% of the famous bon mots attributed to him. It might have been that if you wanted your ideas to spread you had to attribute them to “Pythagoras.”

So it works like SEO, if we mention the name of a celebrity then the site will get ranked higher in search results?

I guess they won't mind if we're thanking them. Thanks Larry Page for making the connection between academic citations and Google search results so we can all find things easily :)

Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

#72

Post by grae_QED »

etothepii wrote: post #22

I don't know if it's true but we were always taught in the History of Maths course at Cambridge[1] that Pythagoras did not exist, or at least there was no evidence of a specific person called Pythagoras. Further if you followed the footnotes in most any research on the subject (especially claims that the Egyptians or Babylonians knew the theorem) you almost always end up at a loose end. [1] https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/…

Maybe its because I'm on mobile, but your link brings me to a faculty page and nothing there suggests Pythagoras wasn't a person.

I even went through the syllabus of the most closely related of their past lectures (a quick history of ancient mathematics and mathematical ideas) and I quickly realized that I don't even know which book to read to try find anything related to Pythagoras' existence.

Is there a specific piece of text I could read that would verify your claim?

Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

#73

Post by babesh »

ttyprintk wrote: post #32
babesh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there are several ideas that are both powerful and that people muddle when they talk about mathematics. Also the talk is often tinged with cultural pride. The ideas are conceptualization, generalization, and rigor. The Pythagorean triples are a conceptualization that for certain right triangles, the squares of the three sides obey a relationship. The Pythagorean theorem is both 1. a generalization that t…

About conceptualization, my understanding is that ancient Greek followers of religious leader Pythagoras realized that this was not only a relationship between length and area, but a formula for irrational numbers. This might be a claim without evidence, and would not be the first time Western education has tried that. Babylonians had no problem arriving at solutions to square roots, and a lot of their texts are yet…

Yes, irrational numbers were a great discovery (including how they were discovered) and the systematic treatment of math in The Elements was a better example of the advancement in approaches to knowledge and thinking. And yes, if the Pythagoreans actually thought that this was a formula for irrational numbers, that would indeed to quite impressive.

Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

#74

Post by babesh »

ttyprintk wrote: post #38
babesh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, rigor was romantacized. With the exception of The Elements, very little math till the last maybe 200 years had that level of rigor. Newton and Leibniz sure didn't.

This is one of my pet peeves, too, an obsession with referencing the first to try innovative math. Maybe Babylonian root finding is a simplified case of what we call Newton’s method. The minimum level of rigor for a concept to go from theorem to proof is both human and philosophical. We get very little recognition for the mathematicians putting in the hard work, and detrimental recognition for concepts that don’t exa…

Yes, and that path dependence isn't limited to mathematics, but people love prestige.

Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

#75

Post by helsinkiandrew »

spoonjim wrote: post #51
tim333 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth Wikipedia has him as a real person living 570 – c. 495 BC, son of Mnesarchus, a gem-engraver on the island of Samos, who travelled to Croton about 530 BC and set up some kind of school there.

It might be the mathematical equivalent of Winston Churchill... a person who definitely existed, but who didn’t say 90% of the famous bon mots attributed to him. It might have been that if you wanted your ideas to spread you had to attribute them to “Pythagoras.”

Or it was discovered by his followers and students (pythagoreans), or perhaps his name become associated with people who were mathematical philosophers at the time.

Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

#76

Post by pushpen99 »

estaseuropano wrote: post #61
pushpen99 wrote: post #33

copied/stolen from India/Hindus

There is a huge swath of Indian comments here, claiming vaguely that all these are Indian ideas without any evidence to back this up. Would be curious to see some actual evidence. Not to forget that things can also be invented/discovered more than once independently.

Pythagoras had visited India as reported by Diogenes Laertiu. Pythagoras theorem is actually Baudhayana Sutra and was widely used by Brahmins in India to build vedic hawan kunds.

Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

#77

Post by WorldMaker »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #75
spoonjim wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be the mathematical equivalent of Winston Churchill... a person who definitely existed, but who didn’t say 90% of the famous bon mots attributed to him. It might have been that if you wanted your ideas to spread you had to attribute them to “Pythagoras.”

Or it was discovered by his followers and students (pythagoreans), or perhaps his name become associated with people who were mathematical philosophers at the time.

Yeah, it could be a case of syncretism: Pythagoras' school was perhaps a meeting of minds that took a bunch of disparate ideas/concepts from all over the world and finally nailed them down into more concrete shapes and merged similar but equivalent concepts into grander shared abstractions. Then things like "Pythagoras's school found" and "Pythagoreans believed" accidentally over the years get rubbed off to read "Pythagoras found" and "Pythagoras believed" in a "great man fallacy/conflation" between the school of thought and the nominal figurehead.

My understanding is that is possibly an incredibly common view on Greek history. For instance, I've heard that a lot of things attributed directly to Plato today seem better attributed to platonists in general and the wild maelstrom of activity in the forums.

Getting maybe further aside and into the weeds: Pythagoreanism was even a multiple-times revived religion in Greek culture, so that would give further reason to attribute things to Pythagoras as "religious texts" things from other scholars or things from later movements (such as neopythagoreanism, which I found in one rabbit hole deep dive has a lot of interesting but unproven ties to early Christian doctrine). (Similar to how so much scholarly work in Asian history got attributed to "The Buddha" before eventually some of them started attributing things maybe more accurately to just "a buddha".)

Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

#78

Post by throw13579 »

throw13579 wrote: post #68
codekilla wrote: post #6

Yes, 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 Hindu mathematicians Baudhāyana certainly discovered the theorem before Pythagoras [1] and Bhāskarāchārya independenly proved the theorem [2] (though the latter seems it was after Pythagoras). It is also possible to discover mathematical truths without providing a formal proof. Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan "independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Many were comple…

Being downvoted. Let me correct myself, HN: all discoveries have been made by white people. These discoveries have been made in the last 6000 years, the only time that this universe has existed (according to the white people's good book).

Re: The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras

#79

Post by known »

estaseuropano wrote: post #61
pushpen99 wrote: post #33

copied/stolen from India/Hindus

There is a huge swath of Indian comments here, claiming vaguely that all these are Indian ideas without any evidence to back this up. Would be curious to see some actual evidence. Not to forget that things can also be invented/discovered more than once independently.

They're beliefs :)
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