Babylonians tabulated 'Pythagorean triples' more than a thousand years before Pythagoras.

1800 BC · 530 BC · apart: 1270 years

The clay tablet Plimpton 322, from around 1800 BC, lists whole-number triples matching the sides of right triangles.

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The event

• Pythagoras founds his school at Crotonc. 530 BC · Croton. The philosopher Pythagoras of Samos settled at Croton in southern Italy and founded a religious and philosophical community. The Pythagoreans saw number as the basis of the cosmos and pioneered Greek mathematics and music theory.

18th century BC · 6th century BC

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