Pythagoras, you old fraud!

originally posted by: SprocketUK
a reply to: Observationalist


There is a docummentary on Amazon called BAM that credits teh Egyptians with the creation of the golden ratio and goes some way to proving they used a metric system based upon divisions of the circumference of the earth

I would recommend reading who built the moon by knight and Butler for some weird maths .

I was hopeless at English as I am dyslexic but numbers were always easy for me and I can remember owning my maths teacher on a few things in school , especially PI

Here is the 1st video of 6 that goes through How Babylonian Mathematics (in base 60) works, and a discussion of the significant tablet known as Plimpton 322


MesoCalc is a webpage that does a lot of base-60 math for you if you become more interested in Babylonian Math.

If you want to know more about Cuneiform writing, who wrote it, and relevant history, watch any of Irving Finkelstein's videos. He's a fun lecturer.


Someone else mentioned above: Pythagoras is said to have studied for several years in Babylonia. If not mentioned elsewhere, note that the Babylonians at that time were capable of some of what we today call Calculus, Integration.

The Dacians (proto-Romanians?) are not given enough attention in the traditional narrative of the development of European civilization from a Greco-Roman basis. The "great religious reformer" of the Dacians was a gentleman by the name of Zalmoxis. There is a connection to Pythagorean thought, but the details are muddied. Some said he was a slave of Pythagoras, but this fails in that he seems to have lived a generation or more before Pythagoras. I think in the following video, they rather come to the conclusion that it's more feasible that Pythagoras studied for a while in Dacia.
(video in Romanian w/ English subtitles)


Remember that Pythagoras wouldn't eat beans. This point is so often overlooked in discussions of his Mathematical Philosophy.

• Pythagoras c. 570 – c. 495 BC : subject of inquiry
  
• Herodotus c. 484 – c. 425 BC : primary source for Greco-Persian war, and ALL greek knowledge of the world outside Greece up to that time.
  
• Achaemenid (Persian) Empire c. 550 - 330 BC : original assemblers of all land from Greece & Egypt through up to India.
  
• Greco-Persian Wars 499 - 449 BC : informative story if you read Herodotus.
  
• Alexander the Great 356 BC – 323 BC : didn't conquer the world so much as just conquered all of the Achaemenid Empire, and into the Indus River valley.
  

Some people somehow think no one travelled back in the day. In Pythagoras' day, you could speak Greek from (what is now) Marseilles-France and Sicilly, to the Crimea, Half of Turkey (Anatolia), Cyrene (Libya), Cyprus, and there were whole trading cities of Greeks in Egypt. One could speak Greek through Anatolia nearly as far as the headwaters of the Euphrates, then float down to Babylon, which was perhaps THE leading center of learning at that time (Egypt, India, and China excepted).

After Alexander's conquests, Greek was spoken in all the above listed places, but then spreading to also include all of Egypt, Persia, Bactria (Afghanistan), and into the Indus River Valley. When Hannibal was terrorizing the Romans with Elephants, there were only 2 or 3 international borders between Rome and India.

(mentioning just Greek, just to say that common-language(s) greatly facilitates ease of travel. Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit/Prakrit were also much less differentiated 2.5k years ago. Greek, Persian & Sanskrit are all in the Greco-Aryan branch of IndoEuropean language family. Avestan Persian (the religious language for Zoroastrianism) is mutually intelligible with Sanskrit.)

The Achaemenids made Aramaic (language Jesus spoke) a co-official language of their Persian Empire. Aramaic, Hebrew, and Phoenician/Punic (in Carthage) are all West-Semitic languages and somewhat easy to learn one from the others. Babylonian was an East-Semitic language, so similar behaviour and a lot of cognates. "The latest known cuneiform tablet dates to 75 AD." The Phoenician → Aramaic alphabet's ease of learning and use hastened the end of cuneiform. ... including Aramaic notes, because if you didn't speak Greek back in the day (BC), you could speak Aramaic/Punic from Spain across north Africa, through the mid-East & Persia up to the borders of India.

Read Strabo's Geography for a more scientific description of the Roman world (64/63 BC – c. 24 AD). They (the Greco-Roman world) knew that the Earth was a sphere, that something (gravity) pulled things toward the center of the sphere to keep them on it, and that there were probably other Continents on the Earth, but that difficulties in crossing the oceans and hostile-climate zones made the other "Worlds" (like what we call the New World) on the Earth effectively unreachable and thus irrelevant to Strabo's discussion of Geography.

Read the Sand Reckoner by Archimedes (c. 287 – c. 212 BC, of Syracuse Sicilly). The standard Greek number-system was really only good up to 10,000... so in this book, Archimedes invented a exponential-based numeration system capable of calculating up to googles (original meaning), then used this to answer the question: "How many grains of sand would it take to completely fill the Universe?"
He greatly underestimated the size of the Universe, but he set a size larger than what we today would call the Solar System, and then correctly determined the number of sand-grains.

Read "The Closing of the Western Mind: the Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason", by Charles Freeman (©2002). The world used to be a LOT smarter than most of us can accept. This book describes the processes by which Logic and Analysis were abandoned in the west for over a thousand years, starting after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, up until the Italian Renaissance.

a reply to: tnxoxodka

Wow, you seem to know your stuff. That's my bed time reading right there.

a reply to: SprocketUK
This information is not new. I've just checked my inherited copy of "The growth of physical science" (Sir James Jeans, Readers' Union 1950) and I find on p9;
"Recently deciphered tablets of around 1700 B.B. show that the Babylonians of the time were acquainted with the famous 'Therorem of Pyhtagoras' which the Greeks rediscovered in the fifth century B.C."
The footnote citation is to "Mathematical Cuneiform Texts" , by Neugebauer and Sachs (New Haven 1945).

Didn't the pyramid builders use the theorem? They must have predated Pythagoras by a good bit.

Mods please delete.

originally posted by: ufoorbhunter
A Romanian lady in the same work place said years ago that some group had found that her people had partial ancestry from India. Greece is in the same zone as Romania so I guess it's more than possible Indian people ended up in Greece too.

Romanians were barbarians compared to Greeks and so too were Indians and Romania is along way from Greece. The Romanian is probably talking about Gypsies. All that learning from India and the Middle East was as a result of Greek incursions into those lands, the most prominent being the conquests of Alexander the Great. The Oriental martial arts can also be attributed to Greeks and their martial art of pancration. Even algebra, popularly attributed to the Arabs, is a Greek invention.

Pythagoras probably developed it independently similar to how Greeks and Chinese both developed the crossbow about 500BC independently of each other.

a reply to: SprocketUK
gives hint to ancient plagiarism
and im pretty sure indians or the egyptians had clues about the finding the third side and hence square roots

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a reply to: amogus911

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