Pythagoras' Theorem - origins and proofs 5. Plimpton 322 - Babylonian clay tablet 6. You might like to do Activity 2 before you continue. Firstly, we need to appreciate that Pythagoras did not discover the relationship between the length of the sides of a right-angled triangle.
Tradition has it though, that Pythagoras did find the first rigorous geometric proof.
I will digress to describe an extraordinary clay tablet containing evidence of Babylonian knowledge of the relationship, at the end of this essay. It should be seen that the problem of finding Pythagorean triples is to find two square numbers such that their sum is also a square. One possible way that Pythagoras may have arrived at triples is through the use of the gnomon . The gnomon is the name given to the oblique staff which is used to cast a shadow in the sundial. It is claimed that Anaximander, a contemporary to Pythagoras, introduced the gnomon to Greece from Babylon.