A journey through the Pythagorean table
The sun was setting on the horizon. It was a late afternoon on one of those days still under the old time, meaning an hour ahead of where we are now. Despite the time being ahead, I will not talk about the future. On the contrary, I will speak of two recent and distant pasts. In the recent past, while traveling on a highway, I was suddenly struck by a beam of light (fortunately, not a lightning bolt) that made me reflect on the multiplication table and transported me to a distant past. Suddenly, as if in a leap through time, I found myself in the 6th century BC, on an island in ancient Greece, face to face with Pythagoras. Who does not know the well-known rhyme that describes his famous theorem? "On the way to Syracuse, Pythagoras told his grandchildren: The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides." Although the theorem is fascinating, it is irrelevant to today’s topic. Beyond the theorem and many other significant contributions...