I heard about this awhile ago and filed it under dumb facebook shit, but now my grandmother wants us all to read this book that "says some real interesting stuff about what shapes say about the world". Is there anything I should know about this particular type of nonsense?

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    geometry is weird. like the Pythagorean theorem thing for a right triangle to calculate the lengths of the sides. I remember learning that when I was like 13 or whatever and just being like, "yeah, OK, cute trick."

    it wasn't until I was in my 20s when I learned that Pythagoras started this secretive, isolated communal cult in which hundreds of people believed he was a living god, new recruits weren't permitted to look at him until like 5 years in, almost all the members were dudes, and there was a lot of focus on athleticism, probably naked.

    also, Pythagoras didn't laugh and did smoke and mirrors stuff to convince people he could travel to the underworld. There's tons of legends/stories about the guy.

    anyway, after that I thought, "man, they really don't know how to teach math to teenagers."

    • Jeff_Benzos [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      The Pythagoreans were on a fishing trip one time when one of them came up with a proof that the square root of 2 couldn't be reduced to a fraction. They felt very strongly that all numbers could be represented by fractions, so they threw the guy overboard in the Mediterranean to drown