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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

So Pythagoras likely didn't even formulate the theorem - he was more into numerology and only cared about sum of squares triplets, not the results about right triangles.

On the other hand, we have strong evidence that the Babylonians understood and applied the "Pythagorean" theorem long before Pythagoras lived.

Additionally, the first recorded explicit statement of the theorem is actually by the Indian writer Baudhayan, over a century before Pythagoras.

The oldest extant proof of the theorem comes from Euclid. The proof commonly attributed to Pythagoras actually first shows up in the Chinese Zhoubi Suanjing, several centuries after Pythagoras.

Quite simply, "Pythagorean theorem" is a major misnomer.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

Things get named after the person who popularized something, not generally after the first to discover it.

It's called the Pythagorean theorem because that's where western people who called it that learned it from, the other things being unknown to them.

Whatever. Still a misnomer in my book. With that said, you are free to invent your definition of misnomer if you so desire.

Explaining why a misnomer came about isn't an argument for why we should continue to perpetuate it.

yeah the babylonians are still a little sore about this misattribution

Here's a reason: sharing, communication, and popularization are even more important than the underlying idea. The Babylonians can fight the Chinese, Egyptians, and 5 other claimants for the historical footnote of who figured it out first. I don't really care. If the Pythagoreans evangelized the concept at a critical juncture in the history of the discourse that eventually became my education, I think that's a fine reason to leave their name on the theorem.

Of course, the Pythagorean theorem is a good springboard for discussing how this works, how attribution is often murky or flat out wrong, how evidence of various bits of math popped up far earlier in history than their official invention, yet remained sterile and ultimately went nowhere because they weren't shared, popularized, and expanded upon. Or it happened but stopped at cultural boundaries and didn't get to us by that path, so we give credit to the person who made that happen. In any case, receiving the idea is what we care about, not originating the idea. See: Euler did it first, Gauss did it first, ancient Indians did it first, ancient Chinese did it first, etc, etc.

We should perpetuate it for at least 3 more years because we have way bigger epistemological fish to fry.

Colonized Indians need to take control of their history like the Chinese did. Otherwise the appropriators will continue to have a field day.

This is a 2000-year-precolonial issue though.

My understanding is that some schools in India teach it as the "Pythagorean theorem" and others as the "Baudhayan theorem" - the choice of which term to use is definitely a colonial issue.

Agreed with ummonk. This is not a pre-colonial issue. This is an issue of colonial-era politics. The dating of many Indian texts was performed by European indologists who were funded by then-colonial governments in a then-colonized India with a view to advance the biblical worldview that the universe is about 6000 years old [1], which any reasonable thinker now knows is pure hogwash [2]. So Indian texts are, in fact, probably a lot older. I believe that a now-decolonized India needs to pay closer attention to its history.

[1] https://www.letu.edu/academics/arts-and-sciences/files/age-o... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/resource-library-a...

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