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 right triangle theorem Fermat's right triangle theorem Fermat's right triangle theorem is a non-existence proof in number theory, the only complete proof left by Pierre de Fermat. It has several equivalent formulations: An immediate consequence of the last of these formulations is that Fermat's last theorem is true for the exponent formula_3 and hence for any multiple of 4. In 1225, Fibonacci was challenged to find a construction for triples of square numbers that are equally spaced from each other, forming an arithmetic progression, and for the spacing between these numbers, which he called a congruum. One way of describing Fibonacci's solution is