9 ms·
But was the theorem proved?
by kobeya 10y ago
But was the theorem proved?
- jacobolus 10y agoIt’s really hard to say. Cuneiform on clay tablets was mostly records of finished computations, with the scratch work done with some kind of physical manipulation of tokens or mentally, and most of the instruction and culture transmitted orally. The Sumerian/Babylonian style of written records did not match, say, Euclid’s Elements. (They didn’t write books full of precise definitions and proofs. They didn’t leave behind textbooks, only problem sets and worked examples.) But note that neither did the style of the Pythagoreans necessarily, and the notion that Pythagoras or his disciples made a proof comes from written records from hundreds of years later.
- fuck_google 10y agoThe proof is so trivial that it is pretty much given once you discover the theorem.