-0575 – Pythagoras – bio
Pythagoras was a Greek mathematician born around -575 on the island of Samos. He is best known for the “Pythagorean theorem” which states that in a triangle with a ninety degree angle (right angle), a square formed by the long side opposite the right angle (the hypotenuse) is equal to the sum of the squares formed by the other two sides.
pythagorean theorem
This theorem may have been known previously to the Babylonians and Indians, but Pythagoras gets the credit for recording his proof of it.
Pythagoras investigated the mathematical ratios involved in musical harmony and believed that planets and stars moved in a similar fashion described as the “music of the spheres”. His wife, Theano wrote about the golden ratio. Pythagoras recognized that Venus was a planet instead of a star.
PRECURSOR:
-0624 – Thales
Pherekydes
-0610 – Anaximander
SUBSEQUENT:
-0425 – Plato
-0325 – Euclid
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[...] PRECURSOR: Pythagoras [...]
[...] -0575 – Pythagoras -0310 – Aristarchus 0085 – Ptolemy 1473 – [...]
[...] -0575 – Pythagoras – the followers of Pythagoras believed primes to have mystical qualities. -0276 – Eratosthenes – described the “sieve” method of finding prime numbers by eliminating all of the multiples of each prime, showing only the prime numbers left -0325 – Euclid – proved that there an infinite number of primes 1588 – Mersenne – studied a variation of Fermat’s theory of prime numbers, 2^n – 1 (2 raised to the power of n then having 1 subtracted from it) which became associated with his name – not all of these candidates produce prime numbers, but there are currently 47 known Mersenne primes 1601 – Fermat – postulated that 2^n + 1 (2 raised to the power of n then having 1 added to it) it produces another prime number if n = a power of 2 1707 – Euler – showed that 2^32 (2 raised to the 32 power) fails as a prime and this disproved Fermat’s theory 1752 – Legendre and 1777 – Gauss both created estimates that for large numbers, the density of prime numbers nearby is 1/log(n) – this is now known as the Prime Number Theorem 1826 – Riemann the famous Riemann Hypothesis deals with the roots of the zeta function and the distribution of prime numbers [...]