[loondri]

It's interesting that Pythagoras gets credit for a theorem he may not have discovered, especially when there's proof that Babylonians knew it 1000 years earlier.

This challenges the idea that ancient Greek mathematicians were always ahead of others.

[drexlspivey]

It’s interesting that people in a CS forum don’t seem to know what a theorem is. The tablet shows that the relationship was known, a theorem needs a proof

[seanhunter]

It's in the tradition of maths that things are named after the second person to prove them/make them well known. There are numerous examples, but one of my favourites is Venn diagrams, which were called (by Venn) "Eulerean Circles" because he took them from Euler. Everyone else is like "Nope - Venn Diagrams."

It's probably just as well because otherwise just about everything would be named after Gauss which would make learning maths even more difficult than it already is.

The Pythagoreans did make a number of important discoveries to do with number theory, the ratios between string lengths for various musical notes (eg twice as long is an octave lower etc), cosmology and some other results in geometry to do with the properties of various 3-d shapes and stuff.

[loondri]

Interesting, thanks for sharing this

[detourdog]

I think it is the latin based culture that hold the greeks up as the great ones.