Pythagorean triples have been known about since ancient times. Plimpton 322 is a boring name for a very exciting object, and a relatively famous mathematical artefact. It dates from around 1800BC and has a table of Pythagorean triples on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise the numbers; they’re written in cuneiform. Plimpton 322 was written by the Babylonians – a group of people who lived close to what is now Iraq. To put it simply, Pythagoras didn’t discover the relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle. He just wrote it down, proved it and named it after himself.