| SimReal: Teacher Education - Mathematics - Pythagoras | |
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Pythagoras has been credited as the founder of the movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of the information about Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, so very little reliable information is known about him. He was born on the island of Samos, and traveled, visiting Egypt and Greece, and maybe India, and in 520 BC returned to Samos. Around 530 BC, he moved to Croton, in Magna Graecia, and there established some kind of school or guild. Pythagoras made influential contributions to philosophy and religion in the late 6th century BC. He is often revered as a great mathematician and scientist and is best known for the Pythagorean theorem which bears his name. However, because legend and obfuscation cloud his work even more than that of the other pre-Socratic philosophers, one can give only a tentative account of his teachings, and some have questioned whether he contributed much to mathematics or natural philosophy. Many of the accomplishments credited to Pythagoras may actually have been accomplishments of his colleagues and successors. Some accounts mention that the philosophy associated with Pythagoras was related to mathematics and that numbers were important. It was said that he was the first man to call himself a philosopher, or lover of wisdom and Pythagorean ideas exercised a marked influence on Plato, and through him, all of Western philosophy. Since the fourth century AD, Pythagoras has commonly been given credit for discovering the Pythagorean theorem, a theorem in geometry that states that in a right-angled triangle the area of the square on the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares of the other two sides that is: a2 + b2 = c2 Click on the picture to get more information about Pythagoras. |
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In the picture to the left you see a geometric picture of Pythagoras's theorem: The area of the red square plus the area of the blue square is equal to the area of the gray square. a2 + b2 = c2 Click on the picture to look at a video about The Theorem of Pythagoras. |
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In the picture to the left you see a practical use of the theorem of Pythagoras: We want a right angle (90 degrees) in a building. We can be sure the angle is 90 degrees if we measure 3m, 4m and 5m as shown in the picture. This is so since: 32 + 42 = 52 Click on the picture to look at a video about a practical use of The Theorem of Pythagoras. |
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