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.
Pythagoras CANCELLED for ACADEMIC PLAGIARISM
3 hours later
“Pythagoras issues an apology video for stealing his crowning achievement from a piece of clay”
Was he playing a ukulele?
Three hours after that
“Justice Department launches investigation into accusations of missing persons in the Pythagorean Cult compound.”
Tablet man sues Pythagoras for IP infringement
How do I pronounce 17 arrows pointed in different directions? click click clack?
Telephone router noises, the universal language
Could’ve sworn there were already other instances of people discovering before Pythagoras even before this.
There are.
“It was just parallel thinking, bro…”
You sir, win the internet today.
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!
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
We’re discovering this fungus that breaks down plastics and I’m wondering… How many times have we independently invented plastic?
With the required manufacturing tools and source materials, probably not a lot of times.
Manufacturing? Like this? [Antikythera Mechanism on Wikipedia] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism)
Or this? Metalworking in pre-Columbian America (Do scroll down to the South America section)
Or just like… waves broadly The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC,…If that fungus (or the wax worm for that matter) was more widespread at any point in the last 40,000 years, we just wouldn’t know about any use of plastics.
We have phylogenetic techniques to interpolate when certain genes might’ve appeared in evolutionary history. Not surprisingly, the ability to breakdown plastics is quite new.
Not only that, but the very few microorganisms that can degrade some plastics only express those enzymes under extreme pressure, when no other sources of carbon are available. Literally every sugar is a better alternative than plastic, as the process of degrading it is massively inefficient.
Making a usable polymer out of the absolute insane mixture that is crude oil is also way beyond what any human civilization could ever achieve without industrialization.
I get your point of “but we did amazing things in the past! look at the complexity of steel!” but artificial plastic polymers is in another league.
Also my point is not “we were so awesome”, it’s “why do we think every generation before us was a drooling caveman”
why do we think every generation before us was a drooling caveman
We do not. But there’s a massive jump in logic from the idea that we could handle bronze versus we could make plastic.
And once again, the biological portion of your statement makes no sense.
crude oil
tree oil and formalin
The process is significantly more complex for plastic, not comparable to metalworking
The closest comparable material is variants of wax
oh, hundreds
deleted by creator
I wasn’t being serious.
That’s very hard to tell, and that’s on you.
I’m comfortable with that.
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.
For anyone interested, that’s called a palimpsest.
a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.
This!
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?
“Let no one’s work evade your eyes, just plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize. But always please call it research.” – Tom Lehrer (Lobachevsky)
Ah yes the Claytablorean Theorem
Are you saying that IM67118 Theorem is not recognized?
Recognized or not, I will be wondering if Pythagoras was actually the Edison of his time…
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? @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?
Middle schoolers certainly curse him
Being an ancient Greek man I bet the boys would curse him even more if they met him.
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
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
deleted by creator
I’m fat. I saw a rib roast at first.
Babylon: Based 60
Nice. A repost from two days ago from a repost from 5 years ago. This us old news.
Please list all news facts now, so there will be no reposts.
If you miss one, delete your account for misinformation.
It’s the only way
