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The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
- contingencies 5y agoExpounded in modern publication since at least Weisheit und Wissenschajt: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos, und Platon (1962)
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062020
- dang 5y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Australian mathematician discovers applied geometry on 3,700-year-old tablet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062020 - Aug 2021 (11 comments)
- ArtWomb 5y agoNext up: the shocking discovery of a Vedic interpretation of quantum chromodynamics ;) https://www.sanskritimagazine.com/vedic_science/quantum-mechanics-vedic-influence/ https://www.sanskritimagazine.com/vedic_science/quantum-mech...
- rishikeshs 5y ago:P
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoI believe sites like these do a disservice to the ancient knowledge of Hindu people. There were many important discoveries, some unknown to the West for centuries, and still not having enough exposure (when you read math books, they start with Greeks, then maybe they gloss a bit over al-Khwarizmi and then jump right into the 17th century to all big names, as if nothing was happening for over a thousand years - well, a lot was going on, just not in Europe). However, some people exaggerate in the other direction, I'm not sure if this is just a Hindu thing or a more global phenomenon, but there is a limit of what you can explain using Vedas, at least as far as science is concerned. (Metaphysics is something different, but this a completely different discussion.)
- Xplune13 5y agoI agree. As an Indian it is just sad that there are people that do this. The effect of such articles is actually the loss of faith in the real findings of those ancient people caused by exaggerated claims presented in these articles. There are so many actual great things and findings written in those texts, but it seems like people are either in the ship of "Everything is in Vedas" or "All this isn't worth researching". The lack of interest in researching these ancient texts caused by these 2 extreme sides is disheartening.
- newyankee 5y agoPer this source, in their own words Fibonacci credits Indian mathematician for his series. There is a great deal of disservice done to Eastern sources in the history of Science & Mathematics which is mostly because modern versions of these mostly skipped these places. https://trueindologytwitter.wordpress.com/2020/03/31/indian-origins-of-the-fibonacci-sequence/ https://trueindologytwitter.wordpress.com/2020/03/31/indian-...
- Xplune13 5y agoNo doubt about it. There are A LOT of things that aren't credited correctly in the modern world, but these articles that I referenced aren't helping the situation at all. On the contrary, they're worsening the state all these topics are in with their exaggerated claims which make people question the integrity of the real work itself. There should be thorough studies about Indology (at least in far greater number than there are right now) without all these click-baity articles associated with it.
- Falandafa2021 5y agoPeter kingsley talks about this in both reality and a story that will pierce where you dive deep into the hidden connection between Pythagoreans and mystical traditions leading back to the mountains of Tibet. The teachings of Falan Dafa also discusses this claiming that the earth and human civilizations has gone through cycles of destruction and renewal with the last period occuring in the time of the ice age where a small surviving group of mystics in Tibetan mountains managed to survive which matches up with the flood stories across cultures and recent scientific discoveries outlined by people like Graham Handcock.
- throw13579 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation
- 8note 5y agoThe last sentence reads like a joke about how his equation was improved by Dirac to consider the speed of light
- codekilla 5y agoYes, but the point is the approach to proof (proving this for all cases) that represented a paradigm shift in mathematics, largely attributed to Thales.
- sn41 5y agoThe earliest known proof of Pythagorean theorem is due to Euclid. It is strange at all that any credit is attributed to Pythagoras, since Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians and Chinese all had discovered this [1]. And Pythagoras did not prove his theorem, to the best of our knowledge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History
- ttyprintk 5y agoAlso weird that (more generally) Euclid is only rarely mentioned by name, and more often nearly anonymously as the author of Elements. Yet, Pythagoras is named early and often.
- ashtonkem 5y agoEuclid got Euclidean geometry, and that’s not nothing.
- Galanwe 5y agoFrom what I remember from my epistemology courses, it's due to historiographical reasons: there are a lot of cross reference of the existence of Pythagoras from other texts, so his historical context and existence is well anchored. As for Euclid, apart from the Elements, there is pretty much no mention of him anywhere, which is even more troubling since the depth and reach of the Elements is massive and should have had an impact at the time. This led some people to think that Euclid may not be a person but a group of people. This is what I remember from courses 15 years ago, I may be wrong or outdated on the subject ;)
- ttyprintk 5y ago
- echopurity 5y agoThe great man theory almost always fails. The life of Pythagoras is largely myth. This theorem was most likely known and proven well before him. This is old news. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jt.2009.16 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jt.2009.16
- h2odragon 5y agoTomorrow, the newly formed "Estate of Pythagoras" corporation will begin selling shares in its upcoming lawsuits against "everybody who has ever used math" for IP infringement as appropriate in their many jurisdictions. No one will really bet big on it until Disney takes them over.
- Koshkin 5y agoThis is yet another evidence in favor of the idea that mathematics is not invented but discovered.
- ganzuul 5y agohttps://archive.is/DUZat https://archive.is/DUZat
- kgeist 5y agoDid Pythagoras/Pythagoreans ever claim they invented all the things they discussed?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- contradistinct 5y agoNothing is ever invented by the person it's named after [1]. [1]: https://taylor.gl/blog/11 https://taylor.gl/blog/11
- etothepii 5y agoI don't know if it's true but we were always taught in the History of Maths course at Cambridge[1] that Pythagoras did not exist, or at least there was no evidence of a specific person called Pythagoras. Further if you followed the footnotes in most any research on the subject (especially claims that the Egyptians or Babylonians knew the theorem) you almost always end up at a loose end. [1] https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/about-us/staff-profiles/tutor/piers-bursill-hall https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/about-us/staff-profiles/tutor/pier...
- tim333 5y agoFor what it's worth Wikipedia has him as a real person living 570 – c. 495 BC, son of Mnesarchus, a gem-engraver on the island of Samos, who travelled to Croton about 530 BC and set up some kind of school there.
- spoonjim 5y agoIt might be the mathematical equivalent of Winston Churchill... a person who definitely existed, but who didn’t say 90% of the famous bon mots attributed to him. It might have been that if you wanted your ideas to spread you had to attribute them to “Pythagoras.”
- throw13579 5y agoA bit OT, but I think it's safe to say that Winston Churchill was worse than Adolf Hitler [1][2]. But because victors write history, we see one as the embodiment of good and the other as the embodiment of evil. Downvote away! [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/11/churchill-white-supremacist-leading-empire-worse-nazis-claims/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/11/churchill-white-... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/winston-churchill-adolf-hitler-no-better-shashi-tharoor-indian-politician-post-colonialist-author-inglorious-empire-nazi-a7641681.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/winst...
- peterburkimsher 5y agoSo it works like SEO, if we mention the name of a celebrity then the site will get ranked higher in search results? I guess they won't mind if we're thanking them. Thanks Larry Page for making the connection between academic citations and Google search results so we can all find things easily :)
- ummonk 5y agoSo Pythagoras likely didn't even formulate the theorem - he was more into numerology and only cared about sum of squares triplets, not the results about right triangles. On the other hand, we have strong evidence that the Babylonians understood and applied the "Pythagorean" theorem long before Pythagoras lived. Additionally, the first recorded explicit statement of the theorem is actually by the Indian writer Baudhayan, over a century before Pythagoras. The oldest extant proof of the theorem comes from Euclid. The proof commonly attributed to Pythagoras actually first shows up in the Chinese Zhoubi Suanjing, several centuries after Pythagoras. Quite simply, "Pythagorean theorem" is a major misnomer.
- Natsu 5y agoThings get named after the person who popularized something, not generally after the first to discover it. It's called the Pythagorean theorem because that's where western people who called it that learned it from, the other things being unknown to them.
- yhoneycomb 5y agoWhatever. Still a misnomer in my book. With that said, you are free to invent your definition of misnomer if you so desire.
- ummonk 5y agoExplaining why a misnomer came about isn't an argument for why we should continue to perpetuate it.
- toiletaccount 5y agoyeah the babylonians are still a little sore about this misattribution
- jjoonathan 5y agoHere's a reason: sharing, communication, and popularization are even more important than the underlying idea. The Babylonians can fight the Chinese, Egyptians, and 5 other claimants for the historical footnote of who figured it out first. I don't really care. If the Pythagoreans evangelized the concept at a critical juncture in the history of the discourse that eventually became my education, I think that's a fine reason to leave their name on the theorem. Of course, the Pythagorean theorem is a good springboard for discussing how this works, how attribution is often murky or flat out wrong, how evidence of various bits of math popped up far earlier in history than their official invention, yet remained sterile and ultimately went nowhere because they weren't shared, popularized, and expanded upon. Or it happened but stopped at cultural boundaries and didn't get to us by that path, so we give credit to the person who made that happen. In any case, receiving the idea is what we care about, not originating the idea. See: Euler did it first, Gauss did it first, ancient Indians did it first, ancient Chinese did it first, etc, etc.
- pushpen99 5y agocopied/stolen from India/Hindus
- throw13579 5y agoDownvoting your post. Here on HN, we believe all worthwhile discoveries were made by white people plus a handful of races whose markets we're trying hard to break into.
- estaseuropano 5y agoThere is a huge swath of Indian comments here, claiming vaguely that all these are Indian ideas without any evidence to back this up. Would be curious to see some actual evidence. Not to forget that things can also be invented/discovered more than once independently.
- throw13579 5y agoHere's some evidence: "The Baudhāyana Sulba Sūtra states the rule referred to today in most of the world as the Pythagorean Theorem." "The Baudhāyana sūtras are a group of Vedic Sanskrit texts which cover dharma, daily ritual, mathematics, etc. They belong to the Taittiriya branch of the Krishna Yajurveda school and are among the earliest texts of the genre, perhaps compiled in the 8th to 6th centuries BCE." [1] Note that the "perhaps compiled in the 8th to 6th centuries BCE", while still older than Pythagoras, comes from dating of Indian texts by European indologists. These indologists were funded by then-colonial governments in a then-colonized India with a view to advance the biblical worldview that the universe is about 6000 years old [2], which any reasonable thinker now knows is pure hogwash [3]. So Indian texts are, in fact, probably a lot older. I believe that a now-decolonized India needs to pay closer attention to its history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudhayana_sutras#Pythagorean_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudhayana_sutras#Pythagorean_... [2] https://www.letu.edu/academics/arts-and-sciences/files/age-of-earth.pdf https://www.letu.edu/academics/arts-and-sciences/files/age-o... [3] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/resource-library-age-earth/ https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/resource-library-a...
- pushpen99 5y ago
- Mikeb85 5y agoSo who's the Babylonian guy who we can name it after? Also, this has been well known for awhile.
- joemaller1 5y agoAn uncomfortably large percentage of our population doesn’t understand the theorem, no matter what it’s called. But sure, let’s quibble about the name.
- gremloni 5y agoIt’s important because otherwise you keep getting the “white people made everything” argument.
- senorsmile 5y agoThis makes me want to learn Akkadian and it's descendants even more now.