During his time studying in Egypt, it must have been the pyramids that caught Pythagoras' eye.
The pyramids, the tombs of kings who were considered incarnations of the sun god, provide a glimpse into the religion and architectural style of ancient Egypt.
Among them, the pyramid of King Khufu of ancient Egypt is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
It was built around 2560 BC and is approximately 147 meters high, made up of over 2.3 million stones weighing an average of 2.5 tons.
It is surprising that each ridge was made to point east, west, south, and north, and the error is very small.
It would have been impossible to build such a structure roughly by eye.
If you were to stack stones from the bottom up and have them meet at the very top, it would have been impossible to do it with rule of thumb, so you would have needed mathematics, specifically geometry, which deals with the properties of shapes.
Among the geometries, knowledge of right triangles was essential for architecture.
Why are right triangles important? When building a building, tamping the ground is important, but erecting the building straight is paramount.
We use a protractor to make sure that our stones are at right angles when stacking them on the ground, but the ancient Egyptians had something else.
It is 'harpedonopta', which means 'rope puller'.


Hapedonopta is a method of measuring right angles by having three slaves pull a rope. If they tie 12 knots for a given length, they can obtain a right angle.
If you pull the rope so that the number of knots on one side is 3, 4, or 5, a right angle is created between the side with 3 knots and the side with 4 knots.
Because a triangle with sides 3, 4, and 5 is a right triangle.
Just looking at this, we can see that the ancient Egyptians already had knowledge of the lengths of the three sides of a right triangle.

---「PART 01.
Pythagoras, who discovered the secret of the right triangle, was actually the leader of a religious group that worshipped mathematics as a 'god'?

Fermat's Last Theorem became widely known to the public thanks to the German businessman and amateur mathematician Paul Wolfskehl.
He donated 100,000 marks to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Göttingen as a prize for the first person to completely prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
In accordance with his wishes, the Wolfskell Prize was established in 1908, and the prize is to be awarded to anyone who presents a complete proof within 100 years.


There is a story about why Wolfskell donated the prize money.
Deeply heartbroken after being rejected by the woman he had a crush on, Wolfskell decided to commit suicide.
After choosing a suitable day to end my life, I decided to pull the trigger of my pistol at midnight that day.
He had finished putting his affairs in order and had even written a will to his friends and family, but there were still hours left until midnight, so he went to his study and started flipping through books.
The book he happened to be holding in his hands was a treatise on Fermat's Last Theorem.
As he was examining the calculations, Wolfskell discovered a calculation error and fell into deep thought, trying to figure out how to correct it.
Meanwhile, it was well past midnight, and Wolfskell, realizing that he had forgotten the pain of his heartbreak while engrossed in his math problems, tore up the will and decided to live again.
It is said that Wolfskell, who was given a new life thanks to Fermat's Last Theorem, donated a prize of 100,000 marks to thank his benefactor.


With a large prize at stake for a seemingly easy problem, numerous amateur mathematicians sent their own logical but flawed proofs to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.
In the first year of the Wolfskell Prize, 621 proofs were received, and incorrect proofs continued to arrive.
It is said that when the received evidence was collected and piled up, it became 3 meters high.
So Fermat's Last Theorem became the 'problem with the most incorrect solutions' and was even listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the 'world's most difficult math problem'.
Fortunately, in 1995, less than 100 years after the Wolfskell Prize was established, Fermat's Last Theorem was proven by Andrew Wiles.
After the proof was published and went through a rigorous two-year verification process, Wiles was awarded the Wolfskell Prize in 1997.

---「PART 07.
"Fermat, an amateur mathematician who beat a professional, enters the Guinness Book of World Records for solving the world's most difficult math problem"

Although Gauss achieved great success in mathematics, most of his life was actually spent studying astronomy and physics.
In fact, he was a professor of astronomy, not mathematics, for nearly 50 years and even served as director of the Göttingen Observatory.
It was an asteroid discovered on the first day of the 19th century that allowed him to take up his post at the Göttingen Observatory.
On January 1, 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi, an Italian monk, mathematician, and astronomer, discovered the asteroid Ceres.
After only a few weeks of observation, the asteroid passed close enough to the Sun to disappear into the bright sunlight.
Gauss, then twenty-four, applied new mathematical theories to just a few weeks of observations and predicted the asteroid's orbit a year later.
In December 1801, the asteroid Ceres was observed again, very close to where Gauss had predicted.


This work made Gauss's name widely known, and in 1807 he was appointed professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at the University of Göttingen.
During his 48-year tenure as director of the Göttingen Observatory, Gauss published 65 books and papers on astronomy and pioneered new fields of mathematics.
In 1831, he was appointed professor of physics and achieved many results through joint research with fellow professors.
He also contributed to the field of electromagnetism, including research on the Earth's magnetic field and the creation of the first electric telegraph.
The gauss (G), one of the units used today to measure the strength of a magnetic field, is named after Gauss to commemorate his achievements in this field.

---「PART 10.
"Gauss, who created a new geometry, was a great perfectionist?"