History of mathematical notation back to any school or period before that of the Ionian Greeks, but the subsequent history may be divided into periods, the distinctions between which are tolerably well marked. Greek mathematics, which originated with the study of geometry, tended from its commencement to be deductive and scientific. Since the fourth century AD, Pythagoras has commonly been given credit for discovering the Pythagorean theorem, a theorem in geometry that states that in a right-angled triangle the area of the square on the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares of
Pythagorean theorem the dot product of vectors. The dot product is called the "standard" inner product or the "Euclidean" inner product. However, other inner products are possible. The concept of length is replaced by the concept of the norm ||v|| of a vector v, defined as: In an inner-product space, the Pythagorean theorem states that for any two orthogonal vectors v and w we have Here the vectors v and w are akin to the sides of a right triangle with hypotenuse given by the vector sum v + w. This form of the Pythagorean theorem is a consequence of the properties