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Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

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Re: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

#161

Post by nerddadnear40 »

pavlov wrote: post #153
dr_dshiv wrote: post #10

Pythagoras was specifically known for accumulating the wisdom of diverse cultures—supposedly he met Thales, was initiated as Egyptian priest in Hermopolis, spent time in Babylon after being captured, and was initiated into every mystery cult he could. And as a boy on his home island of Samos, he would have been exposed to the building of the largest stone temple in Ancient Greece (to Hera) and the incredible engineer…

> "The relationship between math and spirituality was very strong back then!" Seems to me this connection is having a resurgence now as people attempt to project the capabilities of computers beyond human capabilities, where the implications are necessarily bordering on spiritual. Examples include transhumanism, Yudkowsky-style absurdly extrapolated rationalism (Basilisk etc), the simulation hypothesis, AGI salvation…

Always has been. My favorite example:

George Boole (Who we get Boolean from), had a road to Damascus experience as a teenager and later wrote "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought" where we get our 0s and 1s from, and truth operations, largely to prove God is Good.

The concept of 0 and 1, absolute truth and false, was born from his spiritual views.

Re: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

#162

Post by PawgerZ »

rebolek wrote: post #99
fsckboy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see why that was necessary. You can get pretty far with eyeballing it and custom cutting to fit. i'm not saying at all that I know the answer, but eyeballing and cutting is good for a patio, but on a ziggurat or pyramid scale it seems you don't do so much eyeballing or cutting, and more planning how much material and how many slaves you're going to need for how long, and where to put the doors so the passag…

Please, stop this slave nonsense. Pyramids were built by highly skilled workers, it was prestigious job.

I remember reading about the worker homes and tombs, and I know that skeletal records also showed the workers had much muscular strain. So, it's impossible to deny that there were skilled laborers working on the pyramids, but just because some of the laborers were proven to be skilled and not slaves, doesn't mean slaves weren't used.

The scale doesn't seem right to me. I still can't fathom how that much could be done without using slave labor. If I remember correctly, they layed a block like every 6 minutes for 20+ years.

Do you know how many tombs of laborers were found, or where I could find more aobut that information? I'm very novice when it comes to Egypt

Re: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

#164

Post by 2devnull »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #130
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The relationship between math and spirituality was very strong back then! On Seymour Cray: Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray

That sounds like he was being figurative. He probably meant that he got ideas while working. Every morning, I get up at 5, and take a 5K walk. During that time, I tend to "triage" the day ahead, and often solve problems that were vexing me, the night before. Part of my walk is around a local high school track. There is a small flock of killdeer birds, that hang out there, and I guess they give me the ideas I have, as…

Cray sounds mildly autistic.

Re: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

#165

Post by orochimaaru »

darkerside wrote: post #128
dr_dshiv wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know of any ancient sources claiming that Pythagoras killed Hippasus. Seems unlikely to me! In any case, Hippasus was a fascinating figure: “Aristoxenus (Fr. 90 Wehrli = DK I 109. 31 ff.) reports that Hippasus prepared four bronze disks of equal diameters, whose thicknesses were in the given ratios, and it is true that, if free hanging disks of equal diameter are struck, the sound produced by, e.g., a disk ha…

I'm pretty confused. How do you think an average 8 year old would feel?

They would be fascinated. I have one at home and a 12 yr old. This is the kind of stuff they’re always interested in.

Re: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

#166

Post by gen220 »

maroonblazer wrote: post #145

I was surprised to learn that U.S. President Garfield devised a proof of Pythagoras' theorem. It got me wondering what other U.S. Presidents had an aptitude for math. Jefferson (3rd President) was quite fluent in geometry and surveying, designing his home in Monticello. Herbert Hoover (31st) was a mining engineer. Jimmy Carter (39th) was a nuclear engineer by training, having worked in the U.S. Navy's nuclear sub pro…

George Washington was also a surveyor before his later career(s). It was a well-trodden path to wealth and status for people of middling backgrounds and aptitudes for math and law in the pre-revolutionary U.S.

Re: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

#167

Post by dylan604 »

xxs wrote: post #83
dylan604 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A "you" can, and many individual "you"s presumably did that, to general satisfaction I was chatting with the person that was in charge of marking the fields for the local youth soccer league. I volunteered to help one weekend, and one of the first things he asked was if I knew what a 3/4/5 triangle was since it was the only way to know you'll be squared. I never did figure out to what level he was dead panning his j…

3/4/5 is considered a wood working trick - that many beginners would not know (according to youtube, at least)

I learned it in geometry in like 10th grade. No wood involved.

Re: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

#168

Post by continuitylimit »

scarmig wrote: post #152
seasox wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least he kept his cult real

It seems pretty limiting for a cult, though. You can't count all the members he left out of it.

well, if this cult doesn’t work out for you there is always reddit.com with less “limitations” ..

Re: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

#169

Post by gen220 »

lynguist wrote: post #125

The mainstream is and was _enamored_ with Ancient Greece. Our Western culture made Ancient Greek into the vocabulary root of our sciences. We have a lineage of philosophy from Ancient Greece to the 19th century. Only in the 19th century with archeology (again a neo-word made from Ancient Greek roots – it suggests to the mainstream that the Ancient Greek had a concept of archaeology, which they obviously didn’t have)…

Is it not a simpler explanation that Greece simply did a better job of disseminating its own literature than prior cultures?

My understanding is that the “through line” of modern scientific progress begins in Greece because that’s where “trivially-legible to contemporary scholars” written history began.

Like, we always knew that it didn’t start with Ancient Greece (the Greeks themselves mention this), but because abundant primary sources prior to Ancient Greece don’t exist, there isn’t much we can do other than light a candle for their sake and use its light to read their thoughts as filtered through Plato, etc.

Re: Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)

#170

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

Has anyone found the source for that tablet? All I have found is this:

>Note that quite a few descriptions on Babylonian tablets seem to cite a translation of a Pythagorean algorithm from a ca. 1900BC tablet by a Dennis Ramsey – I have not been able to find the original source of this anywhere.[0]

The linked arctile cites wikipedia and bible-history.com. This book[1] misquotes the supposed tablet as being ycb 7289, probably because these tablets are referenced next to each other on wikipedia.

This[2] website says it's in the British museum.

[0]https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/author/spqr/

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=XDBCEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT257&lpg=...

[2]https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Babylonian_...

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