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.
What? Why? @Salamendacious@lemmy.world 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?
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
Pythagoras said you shouldn’t eat beans. Fuck him, I need my burritos.
Yes, but that led to my absolute favorite joke in Moby-Dick: the fart joke in chapter 1. (It’s important to remember that the “Pythagorean Theorem” is A²+B²=C², but the “Pythagorean maxim” is ‘Don’t eat beans.’)
“For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle.”
I completely missed that, that’s great!
“Fuck Mexicans” - Pythagoras
His whole theorem was for the sole purpose of building a wall.
Oh so now I get why he yelled “I’ll make amarica great again” no one understood until a orange man ran for president
The dude hated beans so much, he got killed by pursuers in front of a bean field because he refused to touch them
Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, they’re funny cause they’re true!
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.
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!
One of the rare moments on teh intarwebz where it comes in handy I read Fermat’s Last Theorem :D