another nail in whitey’s coffin. when will this woke history end

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15 points

Pythagoras wasn’t white. 😎

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6 points

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5 points

I don’t know, this painting of him looks pretty white (please ignore that it was made in the 1920s by an American who had probably never been to Greece)

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12 points

Cuneiform scripts were frequently coppied by scribes, so the theorem could be even older

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4 points

I think that this theorem is at least as old as the pyramids.

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1 point

The recent “Fall of Civilizations” podcast talks a lot about the history of the pyramids. They may still have known a lot about geometery, but the slopes and angles involved in the pyramid building seem to have been trial and error as much as anything

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1 point

The pyraamids are way more complex and accurate as been build only by trial and error. It’s architects knew exactly what they were doing and also geometric theorema way more complex as the one of “Phytagoras”, as shown also in other ancient buildings, which are still difficult to reproduce by modern architects.

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11 points

People used to live longer back then, just look at the bible.

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11 points

It always seemed weird to me that it would be formally developed so late. Like I’ve taken multiple trigonometry courses and can’t even define trigonometry let alone make sense of most of it, but the Pythagorean theorem is a purely intuitive thing everyone does regularly. The first person to take a diagonal shortcut while walking understood it. It should have been the first thing mathematics codified after basic arithmetic.

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8 points

the Pythagorean theorem is a purely intuitive thing everyone does regularly.

Excuse me, what?

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The first person to take a diagonal shortcut while walking understood it.

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9 points

Taking a diagonal shortcut means that you understand a + b > c. That’s a far leap from being able to prove that a^2 + b^2 = c^2.

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It is if you needed to collect taxes and wanted a way to measure 📐

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I take it you haven’t read Plato?

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3 points

I imagine it’s been developed and lost periodically, and some people are averse to irrational numbers. Greece just had continual credit in our intellectual pedigree (as opposed to, say, the Babylonians who had more advanced trig than the Greeks before them and the Greeks were aware of them in some ways).

I think you also need a lot of rectangles and squares to find it necessary. I imagine buildings, but even today a lot of materials are cut to fit (also, the building I am in is not rectangular along any dimension). Maybe legal rectangular plots of land? Idk

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9 points

I thought it was pretty well established that Pythagoras didn’t invent it, he was just the leader of a Math and Murder cult so he stole it

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