|
RHTDM
KALKI is offline
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: I own a tent, it has a hole in it.
Posts: 47,405
My Mood:
Country 
Star Sign:  |
Pythagoras's theorem discovered in India in 800 BC according to renowned historian Dick Teresi. author and coauthor of several books about science and technology, including The God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni magazine and has written for Discover, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly.
"Two thousand years before Pythagoras, philosophers in northern India had understood that gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the sun, the most massive object, had to be at its center."
"Our Western mathematical heritage and pride are critically dependent on the triumphs of ancient Greece. These accomplishments have been so greatly exaggerated that it often becomes difficult to sort out how much of modern math is derived from Greece and how much from...the Indians and so on.
"Our modern numerals 0 through 9 were developed in India. Mathematics existed long before the Greeks constructed their first right angle. On the other hand George Cheverghese Joseph (author of The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics) points out that the early Indian mathematics contained in the Sulbasutras (The Rules of the Cord) contain their own version of the Pythagorean theorem as well as procedure for obtaining the square root of 2 correct to five decimal places. The Sulbasutras reveal a rich geometric knowledge that preceded the Greeks."
(source: Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - By Dick Teresi p. 32). For more on Dick Teresi refer to chapter on Quotes301_320).
|