The Pythagorean Theorem: A 4,000-year HistoryBy any measure, the Pythagorean theorem is the most famous statement in all of mathematics, one remembered from high school geometry class by even the most math-phobic students. Well over four hundred proofs are known to exist, including ones by a twelve-year-old Einstein, a young blind girl, Leonardo da Vinci, and a future president of the United States. Here--perhaps for the first time in English--is the full story of this famous theorem. Although attributed to Pythagoras, the theorem was known to the Babylonians more than a thousand years before him. He may have been the first to prove it, but his proof--if indeed he had one--is lost to us. Euclid immortalized it as Proposition 47 in his Elements, and it is from there that it has passed down to generations of students. The theorem is central to almost every branch of science, pure or applied. It has even been proposed as a means to communicate with extraterrestrial beings, if and when we discover them. And, expanded to four-dimensional space-time, it plays a pivotal role in Einstein's theory of relativity. In this book, Eli Maor brings to life many of the characters that played a role in the development of the Pythagorean theorem, providing a fascinating backdrop to perhaps our oldest enduring mathematical legacy. |
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... right triangle can be found , given the lengths of the other two sides . But that is not how Pythagoras viewed it ; to him it was a geometric statement about areas . It was only with the rise of modern algebra , about l600 Ce , that the ...
... right triangle ; and even then it singles out one side , the hypotenuse , as playing a distinctly differ- ent role from the other two sides . The word hypotenuse comes from the Greek words hypo , meaning " under , " " beneath , " or ...
... right triangle , showing that the volume of liquid in the first square equals the combined volume in the other two . But there is another reason for the universal appeal of the Pythagorean the- orem , for it is arguably the most ...
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Analytic Hyperbolic Geometry and Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity Abraham A. Ungar No preview available - 2008 |