Who Proved It First: Credit, Convention and Dissent

The name history gave the right-triangle relationship, on a convention this atlas records as contested rather than settled.

Joseph Needham's dissent: the Zhoubi Suanjing preserves an independent Chinese derivation, the gougu theorem, on a timeline at or before Pythagoras, alongside Babylonian numerical knowledge a thousand years earlier still.

A branch built by many hands at once: Paul Erdos across most of the twentieth century, and Frank Ramsey's 1930 lemma, buried inside a paper on formal logic, that became one of the field's most cited results.

One theorem, three names: de Moivre's 1733 special case, Laplace's 1810 generalization, Lyapunov's 1901 rigorous general conditions. No single discoverer, only a century and a half of successive completion.

A Huguenot refugee who never held an academic chair proved the theorem's first case in 1733, from a practical question about gambling odds.

Made the theorem fully rigorous in 1901, seventeen years before his own death in the chaos of the Russian Civil War.

Named for an essay its own author never published; found among Thomas Bayes' papers after his 1761 death and sent to the Royal Society two years later by his friend Richard Price.

A Presbyterian minister who published almost nothing in his lifetime gave a field of statistics its name, posthumously and by accident of a friend's judgment.

Derived the same theorem independently in 1774, unaware Bayes existed, and generalized the Central Limit Theorem in 1810: the trail's one figure who reappears at two separate stops.

J. R. Lucas' dissent: not just who proved a theorem, but what the proof means. Lucas argues it shows minds are not formal systems; most logicians reject the argument as resting on an equivocation.