Pythagoras triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal [to the sum of] the squares of the two other sides"—that is, formula_1. According to a popular legend, after he discovered this theorem, Pythagoras sacrificed an ox, or possibly even a whole "hecatomb", to the gods. Cicero rejected this story as spurious because of the much more widely held belief that Pythagoras forbade blood sacrifices. Porphyry attempted to explain the story by asserting that the ox was actually made of dough. The Pythagorean theorem was known and used by the Babylonians and Indians centuries before Pythagoras, but it is possible that he
Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares version of the statement (in which he also gave the number of possible expressions of the powers of "p" as a sum of two squares) in a letter to Marin Mersenne dated December 25, 1640: for this reason this version of the theorem is sometimes called "Fermat's Christmas theorem." Since the Diophantus identity implies that the product of two integers each of which can be written as the sum of two squares is itself expressible as the sum of two squares, by applying Fermat's theorem to the prime factorization of any positive integer "n", we see that if all the