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.
literally 90% of human history has gone unrecorded, and what has been recorded usually gets destroyed, ransacked or deliberately destroyed, Caligula’s pleasure barges, Tower of Babel, Library of Alexander. Humans have tried to keep knowledge retained. and some people take that personally.
remember when ISIS was at its peak they were just destroying artifacts like it was a kid in a candy store. And that’s just been in the 35 years I’ve been alive.
when Rome fell it took another century for civilization to rediscover the technology and applied lessons used then.
and im a dumb idiot, I’m just making a broad skim, if you could ask a historian they’d likely tell you all the things humans have lost, purposefully destroyed or forgotten along the way.
It’s even more amazing than that in the case of Rome. To cite just one example, by the time of Constantine I in the mid-300s CE, Rome could support armies totaling 650,000 men. The logistics and organization required to do that are staggering. After the fall of Rome, it would take until the time of Napoleon’s Grand Armee in the early 1800s before numbers like that were fielded again. Even today, there are relatively few countries with an active military force of that size. They weren’t just sitting around either. Rome was always fighting someone. It speaks to the ability of ancient peoples to organize and support truly massive endeavors and sustain them over literal centuries. I mentioned Napoleon’s Grand Armee earlier. It was large, but it only lasted for about 5 years.
So, yes, a ton of technology was lost for a long time, both physical and social/organizational.
And during the second Punic war, when Rome mostly just controlled the Italian boot, Hannibal ravaged the peninsula for a decade but Rome just kept raising more armies to fight them. You could say that war wasn’t very well understood at that time (like Hannibal was very good at battles, but couldn’t turn that dominance into its own advantage), but it’s still crazy to me that Rome just had an enemy army just roaming around, surviving on plunder and foraging, destroying the armies Rome sent to oppose it, but otherwise Rome was still able to function as a state to the point where they could raise, organise, equip (actually, they might have had to equip themselves at this point, I think the Empire providing that was one of the innovations they later started), train, move, and feed armies despite it.
Romes navy during the punic wars was basically a boss that always had another stage you would have to beat
And the final stage came years after the previous one had already beaten Carthage because they had the audacity of continuing to be more successful than Rome (in richness of the city), so they had to go back and completely destroy it and enslave the population that was left after the siege. And by destroy it, I mean they literally burned down the wooden parts and carried off the stones that couldn’t be burnt and forbade anyone to make a new city in that location.
Honestly it’s stuff like that that makes me wonder if I’d rather live in a warlord country like Rome back in the day or live in the boring dystopia that is becoming amarica today
We’ve supposedly just rediscovered how to make Roman concrete in the last few years!
Time flies so I thought it was longer. Thanks for the reminder!
We are haven’t figured out how to make Damascus Steel
if you’re an idiot, you’re one of the best I’ve seen yet
I thought it was well established that Pythagoras didn’t actually derive his namesake theorem?
It is. There’s evidence of its use in the Old Babylonian period, evidence in 1800 B.C.E Egypt, India in 700-500 BCE, China during the Han Dynesty at least.
It’s very simple to prove, and anywhere you find squares or triangles in architecture, it was used.
The Han Dynasty started in 202 BC. That’s after Pythagoras died. Not the same thing.
My point was they likely used it independently.
People can re-invent and re-discover things. It still happens all the time in this day and age of worldwide massive communications. I’d be surprised if the right angle theorem didn’t get discovered thousands of times throughout history.
Everyone learns something new everyday. How often have you seen a TIL and thought, “doesn’t everyone know that”
Browsing the wikis, I got the impression research is unconclusive. We don’t know if he had a role regarding the theorem, and what it was.
There is debate whether the Pythagorean theorem was discovered once, or many times in many places, and the date of first discovery is uncertain, as is the date of the first proof. Historians of Mesopotamian mathematics have concluded that the Pythagorean rule was in widespread use during the Old Babylonian period (20th to 16th centuries BC), over a thousand years before Pythagoras was born.[68][69][70][71]
The German version also talks about the various roles Pythagoras might have had or not had regarding the theorem, and how research is unconclusive. One such possibility is that this older Clay Tablet applied the theorem without being able to prove it, and Pythagoras or one of his students could have found a proof.
Also:
The history of the theorem can be divided into four parts: knowledge of Pythagorean triples, knowledge of the relationship among the sides of a right triangle, knowledge of the relationships among adjacent angles, and proofs of the theorem within some deductive system.
So there were lots of meaningful steps one could achieve without actually deriving the theorem. Maybe people were happy to just use math because it works, and a thousand years later someone bothered to prove why.
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.
What? Why? @[email protected] would you care to elaborate? Who curses Pythagoras? Fourier? Sure! Laplace? Fuck that guy AND the goat he rode in on! And don’t get me started on Fermat and his silly margin note joke. But Pythagoras?
Unless OP actually wrote this article, they aren’t saying that. The post text body is literally just the first two paragraphs of the article.
If OP actively copied it, and doesn’t give any indication that it’s plagiarized from the article, then OP can damn well defend it.
I mean…do you not click on the comments sections of articles here? Standard practice is to copy some or all of the article to the text body of the post. I feel like maybe you either need more or less coffee/tea today. Take a deep breath my dude.
do you not click on the comments sections of articles here
Clearly I do.
Standard practice is to copy some or all of the article to the text body of the post
In that case I don’t follow the standard of stealing content when I post something.
I feel like maybe you either need more or less coffee/tea today. Take a deep breath my dude.
Why is everyone telling me to relax? I WILL NOT RELAX!!1!one! /s
I don’t follow the standard of stealing content when I post something.
It’s not stealing, it’s putting some of the info in the post. Most people aren’t going to actually read the article, so for those people, posting some/all of the body of the article gets them to actually read what was posted.
Why is everyone telling me to relax? I WILL NOT RELAX!!1!one! /s
I know you put the sarcasm tag on there, but this is a weird fucking hill to die on, pal.
I do choose weird hills to fight on, don’t I?
Let me try this another way, this time with less sarcasm.
- The websites we link to generate revenue by displaying ads. If we copy the important parts of the articles, and put them on lemmy with the link, then, as you also brought up, people won’t want to read the original article as well. That results in fewer views and less revenue for the author. Is it the same as holding a gun to the author’s face and robbing them? Of course not. But I also don’t think it’s fair to the author either.
- It’s copyright infringement. Plain and simple infringement. If you copy all the relevant parts and don’t offer additional content, like commentary, then the fair use clause is really hard to argue. How copyright attorneys are going to handle getting content taken off the feddiverse is a different thing, but it is still copyright infringement.
Why not reduce the posting rate, and take the time to just write a short enticing description instead?
Why not reduce the posting rate, and take the time to just write a short enticing description instead?
Laziness
who curses pythagoras?
At the very least that one guy who got drowned for blasphemy by the pythagoras cult, because he proved that the hypotenuse of a triangle with a base of 1 is an irrational number.
Also to be fair I imagine more people are cursing Euler for having his name stapled to half of every theorem and proof it seems.
If you start talking about irrationality to a cult you’re kinda asking for it. sqrt(2) is a beautifully irrational number!
and the proof is very elegant - you could explain it to a (smart) elementary school kid
Not gonna lie, that’s extremely comical and on par for pre-early modern humanity
From what I recall from learning about who Pythagoras was as a person he really liked talking things out while sailing
Who curses Pythagoras?
Pythagoras said you shouldn’t eat beans. Fuck him, I need my burritos.
Middle schoolers certainly curse him
Being an ancient Greek man I bet the boys would curse him even more if they met him.
It’s all relative, someone who never touched on Fourier or Laplace might see Pythagoras or trigonometry as the peak of mathematics and something very difficult. There will be some hardcore mathematicians that dream in Laplace…(shudders)
I have had dreams about Laplace transform, they were nightmares, but not as bad ones as the classes.
And don’t get me started on Fermat and his silly margin note joke.
One of the rare moments on teh intarwebz where it comes in handy I read Fermat’s Last Theorem :D
Pythagoras was a brutal cult leader, wasn’t he?
Considering that we’re somewhere on a scale going from “We’re not really sure Pythagoras was even an actual person” to “Pythagoras was a brutal cult leader”. My stance will be that the theorem is useful, and that Fermat, Fourier, and Laplace, apart from being French (which is bad enough to begin with), also made math hard on me in university, at least the last two. Fermat was just a dick with that margin note. Curses on all three of them!
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You encouraged me to go look him up on Wikipedia. The history and legend of Pythagoras is some crazy shit apparently
damn. why did schools only teach the super boring part about the triangles. dude had the golden thigh of apollo and the super-speed of hermes.
also, it really sounds like he was a cult leader.
“Non-existent man publicly called out for misappropriating clay tablet.”
Will any of our writings be found in 2500 years? Are we a myth…?
It seems to be a case similar to Socrates, or Jesus. Nice how Pythagoras was supposed to perform miracles, and stay a month “dead” just to later come back to life.
Will any of our writings be found in 2500 years?
The media on which our electronic data is stored have lifespans measured in just years. Everything that the Internet consists of right now, unless it’s endlessly copied forward, will be lost.
Unless you’re a contemporary, you’ll just be a story.
I thought Jesus was a proven historical figure, because we have some independent Roman info about him.
Source? Seems like Wikipedia thinks he existed.
I’m an idiot, no doubt about that, but fellas I gotta’ say ancient Babylonian writing looks an awful lot like you just hit something with a weed whacker. Are we SURE?
Cool stuff but god damn I miss RedditIsFun showing me what links are before I opened them. I’m currently in bed next to my sleeping wife and that video was suddenly very loud.
I used RiF for 9 years. I miss it too. But I’m using Sync for lemmy and it shows me the full link and that it’s from YouTube. Maybe check it out.
Is there a paid version of it? I’m only using free apps because I’m literally so poor dirt is offering to help me, and when there’s two versions of an app they usually make the free one pretty bad on purpose to get you to buy the full version.
The only difference is that the paid one doesn’t have ads. I don’t know what’s going on, but my free version doesn’t have ads either.
Last I checked, if you deny GDPR / ad personalization thingy under Settings -> Privacy, ads are not shown (There is a box, but it is blank with text “Sponsored content”).
Certain views did not show ads as well.
I’m using Voyager and have never seen a single ad. Out of curiosity do you have AdGuard on your device or something else that would catch ads before you see them?
I use Small Cards layout and it looks like there’s a bug (it’s not a bug, it’s a feature) where it won’t show ads in this layout. It will in other layouts.
I recommend urlcheck from fdroid. Shows you the url and plenty of other features like removing tracking parameters
FUCK YES MY DUDE. I love you.
Connect for Lemmy does that, and it also has a UI rather similar to RIF. As another RIF refugee, this is by far my favourite Lemmy frontend
Rookie move. Always, always, always check phone volume before clicking any link.
For iPhone users, you can press a long click to preview. I’m using Voyager as a PWA and so far it’s better than all the native apps I’ve tried. I don’t really use Lemmy on the desktop because the url isn’t muscle memory yet.
Same here, Voyager is the best so far and they’re updating it constantly plus it’s the most like Apollo which was my favorite. Don’t know about the preview button, thanks for the tip
Weird I’m using Voyager on Android and don’t think it does that, but I’m loving URLcheck as recommended by another guy.
I set up a do not disturb schedule on my phone to avoid that. My apologies. I usually put what I’m linking to somewhere in the text (e.g. Wikipedia or YouTube).
Oddly enough my DND is supposed to be on schedule right now as well and it still played. 😂
I just posted a news article in the dungeons & dragons community (DND) and your comment was very confusing for a second. Check to see if your DND covers media. Android separates alarm, notification, and media volume levels again. (Assuming you’re an android user.)
Lol, that’s hilarious, D&D is dope.
Did she wake up? Mine always wakes up.
No, she slept through it just fine. 😂
I use sync and it shows me the video thumbnail.
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.
How do you erase a manuscript
It was on parchment I believe, it was pretty common in the middle ages to scrape the ink off those and reuse them.
“Let no one’s work evade your eyes, just plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize. But always please call it research.” – Tom Lehrer (Lobachevsky)
Next to it: “First!”
I haven’t seen a comment like that in years. I bet there’s a whole slew of users (lemmies? What exactly are we called here?) Who have no clue what you’re talking about.
we’re lemmings. I’ll be the one with the pickaxe, you can be the one with the parachute
Hey as long as we’re all part of the same team.
Time travel
Omg! I didn’t know Pythagoras taught at Harvard
He was Francesca Gino’s research assistant
I’m fat. I saw a rib roast at first.
It’s legend that Babylon was destroyed most likely taking all of that knowledge with it. I’m surprised that this tablet survived.
Sorry didn’t read the article, but time travel has been proven?
I don’t know about you, but I regularly perform time travel at a rate of one second per second.
Yes.
