To me, it’s: That ancient people thought the Earth was flat.

We have records from around 430BC where Greek philosophers spoke of the Earth being a sphere. In 240BC the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth and was only about 2% out.

  • blindsight@beehaw.org
    0·
    11 months ago

    In general that old math theorems/ideas are named after the mathematicians who discovered them.

    Pythagoras didn’t discover the Pythagorean Theorem. Pascal didn’t discover Pascal’s Triangle. Fibonacci didn’t discover the Fibonacci Sequence.