Question 1

Did Pythagoras discover Pythagoras' theorem?

Accepted Answer

Almost certainly not. The relationship was known and used for **over a thousand years before he was born**, across several civilisations.

**The prior evidence:**

**Babylonian mathematics.** The clay tablet **Plimpton 322**, dating to around 1800 BC, lists what are now called Pythagorean triples — sets of integers satisfying the relationship. Its exact purpose is debated, but it demonstrates systematic knowledge of the property more than a millennium before Pythagoras.

**Egyptian surveying** used the 3-4-5 triangle for establishing right angles, though direct documentary evidence of the general rule is thinner than often claimed.

**Indian mathematics.** The **Baudhāyana Śulbasūtra**, dating to roughly 800 BC or earlier, states the relationship explicitly in the context of altar construction.

**Chinese mathematics.** The *Zhoubi Suanjing* contains the relationship, known there as the **Gougu theorem**.

**What Pythagoras or his school may have contributed** is a **proof** — a general demonstration that the relationship holds for all right triangles, rather than knowledge of specific cases. This is a genuinely significant distinction and reflects the Greek contribution to mathematics: moving from useful rules to deductive proof.

**But even that is uncertain.** Pythagoras left no writings. Everything attributed to him comes from sources written centuries later, and the **Pythagorean brotherhood** he founded had a practice of crediting discoveries to their founder. Modern historians of mathematics are generally sceptical that we can attribute any specific result to Pythagoras the individual.

**What is reasonably documented** about the Pythagoreans is their doctrine that reality is fundamentally mathematical, work on number theory and musical ratios, and the crisis provoked by the discovery of **irrational numbers** — quantities such as √2 that cannot be expressed as a ratio of integers, which contradicted their worldview.

**Naming conventions frequently misattribute.** This is common enough in mathematics to have a name: **Stigler's law of eponymy**.

Question 2

Who was al-Khwarizmi and why does algorithm come from his name?

Accepted Answer

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was a Persian scholar working in Baghdad in the early ninth century, and two of the most common words in mathematics and computing descend from his name and his work.

Question 3

Who was Srinivasa Ramanujan?

Accepted Answer

An Indian mathematician of extraordinary and largely self-taught ability, who produced thousands of results — many previously unknown, some still being proved a century later — with almost no formal

Question 4

Did Eratosthenes really measure the Earth?

Accepted Answer

Yes — and the measurement was remarkably good, achieved with geometry, a well and the distance between two cities, around 240 BC. The observation he started from. In Syene — modern Aswan — at noon on

Question 5

Was Einstein really bad at maths in school?

Accepted Answer

No. This is one of the most durable myths in popular history, and Einstein himself explicitly denied it. Shown a version of the claim in a newspaper, he responded: "I never failed in mathematics.

Question 6

Who was Hypatia of Alexandria?

Accepted Answer

Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who taught in Alexandria around AD 400, and one of the few women scholars of the ancient world whose reputation is securely documented by

Question 7

Was Columbus trying to prove the Earth was round?

Accepted Answer

No. That the Earth is a sphere had been established knowledge among educated Europeans for nearly two thousand years before Columbus sailed, and nobody he petitioned believed otherwise. The ancient

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