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Alberto A. Martinez: The Cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths

University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-8229-4418-8, 264 pp, price: $27.95

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Notes

  1. Unfortunately, Martinez’s account fails to distinguish between the Pythagorean Relation (the geometrical area property) where there is clear evidence that ancient cultures in Mesopotamia, India, and China possessed this knowledge, and the Pythagorean Theorem established by deductive proof. It is considered that the first place where the name “Pythagorean Theorem” appears in English is in Edmund Stone’s (1726) A New Mathematical Dictionary.

  2. Zhmud (1989, pp. 254–258) provides evidence to show that most of the myths about Pythagoras were established by the fifth century CE.

  3. According to Zhmud (2012), “…within the scholarly community no consensus has yet been reached on the most fundamental facts and the separation on the basis of these of soluble problems from fundamentally insoluble” (pp. 1–2).

  4. This passage refers (note 14) to the discovery and translation of the ‘Archimedes Palimpsest’. However exciting this might be, there is still much speculation about the decipherment and interpretation of the text, particularly with regard to understanding whether Archimedes used actual ‘infinity’ in a sense that might have suggested a limiting process. Netz (2003) demonstrates the complexities of this and similar situations.

References

  • Netz, R. (2003). The history of early mathematics—ways of re-writing. Science in Context, 16(3), 275–286.

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  • Riedweg, C. (2005). Pythagoras: His life, teaching and influence (trans: Rendallm, S.). Cornell University Press. (Original work published 2002).

  • Stone, E. (1726). A new mathematical dictionary. London.

  • Zhmud, L. (1989). Pythagoras as a mathematician. Historia Mathematica, 16, 249–268.

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  • Zhmud, L. (2012). Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Correspondence to Andreas J. Stylianides.

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Stylianides, A.J., Rogers, L.F. Alberto A. Martinez: The Cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths . Sci & Educ 22, 2351–2355 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9604-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9604-7

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