>>14054770Yeah. It's in fact a repackaged form of an identity known to the ancient babylonians, who used it for engineering and other calculations. One is that they needed squareroots for calculating the lengths of triangle sides (they knew pythagoreans theorem was true though they had no concept of proving it as we do today, they just took it as a clever trick). Also I remember reading a long time ago, but can't find a source atm, that the priced things in a weird way where technically the best way to find out how much to pay was found by solving a simple quadratic equation. It was like, instead of pricing in dollars per pound, they priced in pound per dollar? IDK it sounded more complex than that when I read it but I can't find the source anymore, I read that like 20 years ago