I think this is a mischaracterisation of Lisp and the history of mathematics. Saying that lisp is all about writing (function arguments...) misses the point. O

I think this is a mischaracterisation of Lisp and the history of mathematics. Saying that lisp is all about writing (function arguments...) misses the point. One can write function application in ML in this way too. The key things are approximately that all syntax could be written as sexps, including things like let and lambda which in other languages require special syntax; and that the semantics (somewhat) corresponds to the lambda-calculus and so includes lambdas. I would not say that Lisp is fantastically succinct. There are many ways to express things and the main advantage of lisp is that you can choose how to do this, so long as you express things in sexps. Yes the (very) ancient Egyptians sort-of knew about Pythagoras’ theorem, although I would perhaps say that the babylonians knew it better. I don’t know whether it is known if they knew that it held for right triangles both ways or just that one could make a right triangle from a^2+b^2=c^2. However I wouldn’t say that Pythagoras made it succinct. For one thing he likely didn’t exist. Also the main contribution of the Greeks to this would be the notion and formalisation of proof (which evolved over time in Greece), rather than the theorem itself. Indeed I would say that the modern expression of the theorem is more succinct than the one one will find in eg Elements