Sagar Shrivastava (TIFR) and I have a new article, on proofs of Pythagoras Theorem. Sagar is finishing his PhD thesis under the direction of C. S. Rajan, who has moved to Ashoka University. This paper was the result of what Erdos might have called illegal thoughts — thoughts that arose during his more serious work on his important thesis on representation theory.

Here is a link to a preprint. The version on arXiv is here. The article is accepted for publication and will appear in Mathematics Magazine.

Update: The reference is: An uncountable number of proofs of the Pythagoras theorem (with Sagar Shrivastava), Math. Mag., 97 (2024), 536-544; (available online).

Sagar attended my lectures on Combinatorial Techniques in Monsoon 2023 on my request. I think he came up with his own proofs of most of the theorems covered in this class. This paper arose because I asked him to help me with a figure of two proofs of the Pythagoras Theorem.

I’m just happy that my Shrivastava number is 1 and thus my Rajan number will be 2!