46 // Who Was Pythagoras?

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ourotorus puzzle.

You can turn this puzzle into a game. Cut out the sixteen pieces shown ­ the small dot near the top tells you which way up they go. Can you arrange them in a 464 grid, keeping the dot at the top, so that adjacent squares have the same colours along common edges? This rule also applies to squares that become adjacent if the top and bottom, or the left and right sides, of the grid are `wrapped round' so that they join.

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Answer on page 264

Who Was Pythagoras? We recognise the name `Pythagoras' because it is attached to a theorem, one that most of us have grappled with at school. `The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.' That is, if you take any right-angled triangle, then the square of the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Well known as his theorem may be, the actual person has proved rather elusive, although we know more about him as a historical figure than we do for, say, Euclid. What we don't know is whether he proved his eponymous theorem, and there are good reasons to suppose that, even if he did, he wasn't the first to do so.

But more of that story later.

Pythagoras was Greek, born around 569 BC on the island of Samos in the north-eastern Aegean. (The exact date is disputed, but this one is wrong by at most 20 years.) His father,

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