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Pythagoras: Pythagoras Theorem
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Pythagoras was a Greek religious leader and a philosopher who made developments in astronomy, mathematics, and music theories. He moved to Croton (a city in southern Italy) and started a religious and philosophical school there. He had many followers called the Pythagoreans. The works of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans can not be separated because the school in which they worked in was restricted to secrecy. The most important idea of the Pythagoreans was that most things could be understood through math, which was important to math and science development. Pythagoras or his students proved the converse theorem, though it was used much earlier in Egypt.
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Pythagoras was an ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher who was one of the most influential men in all of history. Even though he was a mathematician, his contributions help all sorts of fields of study, including math, science, music and astronomy. Most of his contributions, and those of his followers, the Pythagoreans, are known and used throughout the world. Almost everyone knows his theorem that the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two shorter sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the length hypotenuse.
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As a religious leader, a philosopher, a mathematician, and a scientist, Pythagoras had a lot of subjects to deal with. However, during his lifetime, it was quite common, in fact, for Math and Religion to be under the same academic heading. One wouldn’t simply study philosophy, for example, without having a strong base in mathematics. In any regard, since either Pythagoras or his followers became more involved in searching for mathematical anomalies, their finding of the hypotenuse of right triangles has been dubbed the Pythagorean Theorem ever since.
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The Pythagoras Theorem has many uses, both mathematical and practical. Mathematical uses include geometry--the calculation areas and volumes. It is ... used on the cartesian plane in analytic geometry and calculus. More importantly, it is an integral concept in the definition of the trigonometric functions--the sine, cosine and tangent functions are the ratios of the lengths of sides in a right-angled triangle. It is also the idea behind the fundamental identity of trigonometry--sin2x + cos2x = 1.
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Like Thales, Pythagoras is rather known for mathematics than for philosophy. Anyone who can recall math classes will remember the first lessons of plane geometry that usually start with the Pythagorean theorem about right-angled triangles: a²+b²=c². In spite of its name, the Pythagorean theorem was not discovered by Pythagoras. The earliest known formulation of the theorem was written down by the Indian mathematician Baudhāyana in 800BC. The principle was ... known to the earlier Egyptian and the Babylonian master builders. However, Pythagoras may have proved the theorem and popularised it in the Greek world.
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[M]ore than a dozen collections of proofs of Pythagoras's theorem have appeared. In 1894 the American Mathematical Monthly began publishing proofs, but stopped after about 100. That did not prevent one reader - a teacher from Ohio called Elisha S Loomis - from publishing a book with 230 proofs in 1927; its second edition in 1940 contained 370. The Guinness Book of World Records website, under "Most proofs of Pythagoras's theorem", names someone who, it is claimed, has discovered 520 proofs.
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