Response to "Was Pythagoras Chinese?"

"If we consider a bird and a bat, and realize that they both discovered the way of flight separately, who can we really say discovered flight?" -- Me (2024)

This quote was drawn up based on my own thoughts regarding two relatively independent entities coming to the same discoveries and applications, despite having no influence on each others' progress. I was going to use a bird and a fly instead, but I realized that there was likely an evolutionary arms race happening here where either the bird influenced the fly to learn flight or vice versa. Once again, I digress. The idea is that in history, with all the isolated peoples of the planet and their own form of mathematics and numerical/spatial/et cetera reasoning, there are likely many things that could've ended up being discovered independently, with the "Pythagorean theorem" being the star player of this blog post. Thinking about it, I find it somewhat silly to try and attribute the credit to any singular person, and suggest that a good compromise is to allow the theorem to exist under multiple names. HOWEVER, there is a practical downside to this in that it would be very confusing. So the question goes: "If we don't want to have this confusion, who should we go with? The one who said it first? The one who said it louder?" If I were being honest, I would prefer to keep calling it the Pythagorean theorem by virtue of it simply being so ingrained, and I say this as a person of Chinese background. (Also because "Gougu theorem" doesn't roll off the tongue as well.)

Does it really make much of a difference to our students' learning if we acknowledge/don't the non-European sources of mathematics? My initial thoughts before reading the article would have me telling the reader that it probably doesn't make much of a difference. The students can still achieve the same "necessary" mathematics regardless of the acknowledgement (if we take a page from the recent reading on Arbitrary vs. Necessary from EDCP 342). For example, if we never put a name to this magic a^2 + b^2 = c^2 theorem, it doesn't mean that people can't reason with the ideas. It doesn't mean that we can't show the right triangle to a bunch of students, have them discover the relationships of a right triangle on their own and make an absolutely groundbreaking discovery in geometry that would have the ancient Greeks and Chinese flabbergasted by the fact that an 8th grader could discover and prove something so integral, and have the classroom collectively dub it the "Hoang theorem" after their loving, caring, and absolutely fantastic mathematics mentor. (I am absolutely yanking at chains here.) That being said, it is a lot more standardized to just call it the "Pythagorean theorem" instead. As nice as it would be to have my students using my name for such an important theorem, it would likely be very awkward as they try to explain to their contemporaries the name that stuck with them. So to that, I would say there isn't really a big difference in the necessary process. However, by acknowledging all the different sources of discovery, it does allow for a more diversity-conscious classroom and learning process. This could be a motivating factor for students who may be from a part of the world where these sources are; I did find it cool that the Chinese (along with many other civilizations) were able to come to the same conclusions as Pythagoras.

In terms of my thoughts on the naming of the Pythagorean theorem, I'm just happy that there is a standardization that everyone (for the most part) was able to agree on. Standardization has its clear benefits, and I think that despite the lack of crediting, we still receive the dividends of a universal term (unless I'm missing something here and the modern Chinese call it the Gougu theorem). I still think that despite my whole spiel earlier, it's okay to allow a necessary concept to go by multiple names as a way to credit the many minds behind them (although we should still have a principal name, just so people don't get confused). It did raise questions on the sequence of events for me: how good were the Chinese at crediting themselves anyways? Sure, we knew some of the names behind the ideas such as Liu Hui and Chongzi, whereas Euclid is a completely mysterious entity who allegedly lived in Greek-controlled Egypt. However, I feel that because of the long-standing processes of Eurocentrism persisting the ideas of the Greeks -- The Elements -- throughout the world, it really is just as if they "said the joke louder" and got the last laughs. There are many such cases of the Eurocentric side saying the figurative joke louder which ends up obfuscating the global history of mathematics, but that just means that the process of historical discovery is paradoxically easier for us as educators who simply need to search for a few minutes to find fun trivial facts about who else discovered/proved/reasoned about a certain theorem or mathematical idea.