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 that the numbers to be squared are the difference of legs, hypotenuse, and sum of legs of a Pythagorean triangle, and that the congruum is four times the area of the same triangle. In his later work on the congruum problem, published in "The Book of Squares", Fibonacci observed that it is impossible for a congruum to be a square number itself, but did not present a satisfactory proof of this fact. If three squares formula_4, formula_5, and formula_6 could form an arithmetic progression whose congruum was also a square formula_7, then these numbers would satisfy the Diophantine equations That