MATH-UA 120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Pythagorean Triple, George Plimpton
Document Summary
The pythagorean theorem is a nightmare to high school kids. It is, to them, nothing useful, just an equation created by a mathematician to find the third side of a right triangle given the other two. However, what isn"t taught so often is that the history of this theorem spans a much farther distance than a single mathematician. Many people have heard of the famous pythagorean triples 3,4,5 or 5,12,13. Whenever someone mentions pythagorean triple, everyone thinks back to their namesake, the mathematician pythagoras. However, what most people seem to neglect knowing is the fact that these pythagorean triples existed far before his birth in 571. About 1300 years before pythagoras, a small tablet was created in ancient. This tablet is known today as plimpton 322. On this tablet is written a list of numbers that are in base 60. Our normal number system is in base 10.
