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.

  • Marxism-FennekinismEnglish
    54•2 years ago

    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.

      • Marxism-FennekinismEnglish
        28•2 years ago

        It was on parchment I believe, it was pretty common in the middle ages to scrape the ink off those and reuse them.

        • @[email protected]
          21•2 years ago

          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.