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haxor@derp.foo

Pythagorean Theorem Found on Clay Tablet 1k Years Older Than Pythagoras (www.iflscience.com)

submitted 11 months ago by haxor@derp.foo to c/hackernews@derp.foo

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[–] eldopgergan@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Of course they did! If they used this many right angles in their script, they are bound to discover it at least accidentally

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago

And the Romans probably perfected it! Look at all those angles!
A picture of an Old Latin inscription, featuring lots of angled letters.
But of course, pi and other "circle stuff" would need to wait until scribes writing on paper with all those round letters.

Now being serious, I think that it's possible that the Babylonians didn't even discover it, but learned it from someone else. The Sumerians already used squares and rectangles extensively and had good maths, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to find a relationship between the distance of two opposite corners of a rectangle vs. the size of the sides of the rectangle, specially since this stuff has practical applications.