The logical conclusion of what you're saying is that while you cannot patent the Pythagorean Theorem, you could patent using the Pythagorean Theorem to solve tr

The logical conclusion of what you're saying is that while you cannot patent the Pythagorean Theorem, you could patent using the Pythagorean Theorem to solve triangles, perhaps in the context of architecture. That is of course, patently absurd. "Software patents do not cover the mathematical aspects of software" As Knuth explicitly notes in the materials I've already linked, trying to separate the math from the rest of software is a fundamentally flawed endeavor.