Kozhikode: Have we as school students committed a grave error by blaming an ancient Greek named Pythagoras for introducing us to the strange Latin word hypotenuse that we still have not fully got hold of and for all the geometry-induced confusions we had suffered in high school?
Now researchers claim that the man was not even a mathematician. Instead, they say he was just a famous and controversial philosopher in ancient Greece, and had nothing to do with the 'A square plus B square is equal to C square' theorem.
At the best, he could have been a clairvoyant like some of our finest spiritual leaders. The theorem, researchers claim, came into existence much before Pythagoras and was in practice in India, China and Babylonia. They say that the ancient Indian mathematician Baudhayan, who lived around 800 BCE a clean three centuries before Pythagoras, had laid down the theorem in vedic texts.
“Many researchers were not comfortable associating the name Pythagoras with the theorem. This was why the theorem, in later years, was connected less directly with Pythagoras. It was called Pythagorean Theorem. Pythagorean refers to the school of Pythagoras. There is no clear evidence to prove that Pythagoras had come up with it. In fact, in the Indian tradition, the theorem was put to use at least three centuries before Pythagoras. It is there in Baudhayana Shulba Sutra, for instance. There are many treatises that discuss the Pythagorean theorem long before Pythagoras had even existed. Baudhayana Shulba Sutra is one of the first. Shulba means measurement,” says Professor K Ramasubramanian from IIT Bombay, who is an expert in history of mathematics.
That Pythagoras had nothing to do with the theorem in his name is now almost common wisdom. "Pythagoras wrote nothing, nor were there any detailed accounts of his thought written by contemporaries," reads Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It further points out that a number of treatises were forged in the name of Pythagoras and other Pythagoreans.
“The popular modern image of Pythagoras is that of a master mathematician and scientist. The early evidence, however, shows that while Pythagoras was famous during his day and even 150 years later in the time of Plato and Aristotle, it was not mathematics or science upon which his fame rested. Pythagoras was famous (1) as an expert on the fate of the soul after death, who thought that the soul was immortal and went through a series of reincarnations; (2) as an expert on religious ritual; (3) as a wonder-worker who had a thigh of gold and who could be in two places at the same time; (4) as the founder of a strict way of life that emphasized dietary restrictions, religious ritual and rigorous self discipline,” the text reads.
Aerospace scientist and fluid dynamicist Roddam Narasimha, too, had explained earlier that Pythagoras, the contemporary of the Buddha, never wrote anything – not even a statement of the theorem, citing the same text.
However, this knowledge never seeped its way into school textbooks, and to this day students learn the theorem believing it to be done by a man named Pythagoras. Recently, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has included in the class 10 mathematics textbook a reference on the ancient Indian mathematician Baudhayan, while elaborating on the Pythagoras theorem (Page 146, chapter 6).
“The above theorem was earlier given by an ancient Indian mathematician Baudhayan (about 800 BCE) in the following form: The diagonal of a rectangle produces by itself the same area as produced by its both sides (i.e., length and breadth). For this reason, this theorem is sometimes also referred to as the Baudhayan Theorem.”
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