The Babylonians used Pythagorean ideas long before Pythagoras
Surveyors employed them to measure out land
MOST READERS will have encountered Pythagoras’s theorem about right-angled triangles—that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides—at school. But the less-mathematically inclined might have been tempted to ask when such knowledge would ever be useful in real life. One answer, predating Pythagoras by over 1,000 years, is in land surveying.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “No need for a protractor”
From the August 7th 2021 edition
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