Pythagoras left no writings—the earliest Greek axiomatic proof appears in Euclid's Elements around 300 BCE. But Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 shows a remarkably accurate √2 approximation, and Plimpton 322 plus seven other Old Babylonian tablets (c. 2000-1600 BCE) already used right-triangle relationships, pre-dating Pythagoras by over a millennium.
Babylonian tablets show Pythagorean theorem preceded Pythagoras by over 1,000 years
Key facts
- Pythagoras lived in the 6th century BCE and left no writings
- The earliest surviving proof of the theorem in a Greek axiomatic system appears in Euclid's Elements, written around 300 BCE
- Attribution to Pythagoras appears much later in the 5th century CE, nearly 1,000 years after his lifetime
- Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 shows a square with diagonals; a scribe marked one side as 30 and used a remarkably accurate approximation of the square root of 2
- Plimpton 322 contains 15 sets of numbers corresponding to right triangles
- At least 7 Old Babylonian tablets used the squares of the sides of right triangles; these date from about 2000-1600 BCE
- Indian Shulba Sutras attributed to Baudhayana (conventionally dated to ~8th century BCE) also state and use the Pythagorean relationship
Sources
How did the Babylonians know √2 up to six digits? - The Palindromethepalindrome.org
It is called YBC 7289 (short for the 7289th item in the Yale Babylonian Collection), and it depicts a square, its diagonal, and numbers written ...
YBC 7289myslu.stlawu.edu
The famous 'root(2)' tablet from the Yale Babylonian Collection. ... This tablet is a round school tablet of unknown provenance from the Old ...
How the estimate of 2 on YBC 7289 may have been calculatedsciencedirect.com
1:24:51:10 is, in fact, an Old Babylonian estimate of 2 . In decimal, this estimate is 1.414213 which is accurate to 6 significant figures.
Babylon and the Square Root of 2 | Azimuth - WordPress.comjohncarlosbaez.wordpress.com
the Babylonians computed the approximation of √2 seen on tablet YBC 7289. informed and detailed conjectures. Babylonian mathematics: YBC 7289 ...
[PDF] Square Root Approximations in Old Babylonian Mathematics: YBC ...ux1.eiu.edu
We consider several aspects of the role and evaluation of the four-sexagesimal-place approxi- mation to œ2 on the well-known Old Babylonian tablet YBC 7289.
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