Tom Ritchford
1 min readAug 23, 2019

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I’ve read you before, Benjamin, and I admire your work.

And while I agree with your general idea, the specifics aren’t really right.

The Egyptians knew that the 3/4/5 triangle gave a right angle. Other cultures around the same time knew this, and a few other triangles.

There’s no evidence they generalized it at all, and they certainly didn’t prove it, because the whole idea of proof didn’t emerge for almost a millennium.

Heck, Pythagoras almost certainly didn’t prove “Pythagoras’ Theorem” — the first actual proof stems from over a century later!

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