>It is funny that you don't know who first discovered it, but you are positive it wasn't the Greeks.

I'm positive it wasn't Pythagoras. Please argue against my actual statements instead of a strawman. How am I positive it wasn't Pythagoras? Because it existed before he did. That means that barring time travel, I can be positive it wasn't him, but still quite unsure on the first person or people to actually do so.

>Regardless, the Egyptians may have only discovered part of it. As far as I know, they didn't have any mention of triangles which is a rather critical part.

Your knowledge is incorrect - the argument that the Egyptians only discovered part of it is that we only have direct evidence of them doing it for the 3/4/5 triple, and that Pythagoras took that after his time in Egypt and generalized it for any right triangle.

>I don't know about the Babylonians but given your assumption about how much the Egyptians knew despite there being no proof it doesn't look promising for them either. I would welcome any actual proof you have though.

You're already operating from a false basis, but I can speak to the knowledge we have of Babylonians using the theorem: We have several sets of tablets from ancient Babylon that make use of triples for surveying land and calculating ownership. These tables of triples would have absolutely required understanding the theorem to create, and were generalized for use with right triangles. It's possible this knowledge was lost and the Egyptians only knew whatever triples made it to them and that Pythagoras re-discovered the broader use case, but it's also just possible the evidence that Egyptians could apply it more broadly has been lost to the sands of time. Regardless, we do know that Pythagoras is not the first person to discover the theorem.

>How do you know it wasn't the Indians?

I don't. Nor have I claimed to.

>I agree that attributing the Pythagorean Theorem to the Egyptians would solve racism. /s

I am trying to take your comment in good faith, but this makes it difficult to do so. Obviously, no one is claiming that solving this or any other single thing solves anything as large as racism, but mentioning that the theorem has been in use by many cultures that predates Pythagoras does help with the fundamental issue of providing an inaccurate picture of the history of mathematical discovery being as dominated by Western mathematicians as we make it out to be today.

Whether or not you care if the theorem was discovered by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, or Indians doesn't mean that others don't, or that it doesn't play into forming a false sense of superiority about Western scholarly pursuits.

All it takes to help this situation is to provide some history on the theorem and mention that it was used prior to it's modern namesake and provide some examples and you correct a misleading narrative.

>In all seriousness it wouldn't solve any problems if we said the Egyptians discovered it.

Many people are unaware that many mathematical principles were discovered and re-discovered independently across many cultures and many different periods of time. They have a false picture of the history of math that makes it seem as if a huge chunk of the most important mathematical concepts were discovered exclusively by Western mathematicians.

If we need to get into a discussion about how that mistaken belief could play into racial biases, including unconscious ones, we can, but I hope that that is fairly apparent. I also hope it is fairly apparent how solving this could help inspire people from non-Western backgrounds as well, but, again, we can have that discussion if needed too.