PYTHAGORAS

Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the Pythagorean brotherhood. Although religious in nature, It was an extraordinarily secretive society. Pythagoreans believed that souls were reborn after death, they shared communal meals, kept rigorous exercise routines, and were divided into an outer circle of ‘listeners’ and an inner circle of ‘learners’. Only those in the inner circle had access to the deepest secrets of Pythagoras’ teachings. Pythagoras, and his followers, are attributed with several important mathematical and philosophical discoveries. None of his writings have survived, and Pythagoreans invariably supported their doctrines by indiscriminately citing their master’s authority. Pythagoras is generally credited with the theory of the functional significance of numbers in the objective world and in music. Other discoveries often attributed to him the Pythagorean theorem for right triangles, for a right angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. To say that the sum of two squares is equal to a third square meant that the two squares could be cut up and reassembled to form a square identical to the third square. Another debate point beeing, the bulk of the intellectual tradition originating with Pythagoras himself belongs to mystical wisdom rather than to scientific scholarship. The evidence is unclear as to when and where the death of Pythagoras occurred. “having been brought up in the study of mathematics, thought that things are numbers … and that the whole cosmos is a scale and a number.”