History Of Pythagoras

Pythagoras can honestly be considered one of if not the most historically significant as well as one of the first actual mathematicians. Born in 570 B. C. E in Samos, a small but luxurious island known for Samian wine, Pythagoras was a great philosopher from the age of Ancient Greek Philosophy who often mixed his religious and scientific views. He solidified this mix of beliefs through mathematic proportion which he believed them to be the basis for all of life and reality. He would go on to create the bases for most of what we would consider modern math and would even be the one to introduce proportions and mathematics that would end up shaping Classical art and music. Overall, Pythagoras and his teachings, known as The Pythagorean, were received fairly well.

Of course, there were those who thought it was odd there was never much protest over it. In my opinion this is because of the fact that most of his ponderings had to do with number concepts and mathematical principals rather than those based on faith, the existence of God or gods, or anything else that would have been more scandalous and worth protesting. Similar to a lot of the other great philosophers of the time, and a great deal of his teachings are still in use today. During his time Pythagoras was a well-respected bureaucrat. In fact, he even took control the of his home island and ran it well founding a school there called the Semicircle, where many politicians would gather and debate one another without as a show of respect toward Pythagoras’ kindness toward the people. He then founded another school, this one dedicated to philosophy and religion, in Croton of Italy, though they were incredibly secretive and not much is known about the on goings of the school or what was truly taught to its students. What is known of the school is that they were highly religious along and devout vegetarians, and that they followed Pythagoras’ strict rules pertaining to math and vegetarianism (O'Connor, J. , & Robertson, E. ). Pythagoras’ contributions to the “humanistic tradition” as it were is definitely his way of thinking about numbers. He flipped the world of mathematics on its head whenever he introduced his new concept of numbers.

Obviously, mathematics existed back then but the numbers themselves were very different to what we would think of now. Numbers back then were simply a concept used to describe an amount of things which is similar to what we think of them now, but back then that’s all they were. Pythagoras postulated that numbers themselves were things and they had characteristics that described them. His teachings stated things like numbers were either effeminate or masculine and that due to the fact that one, two, three and four added together equaled ten, that ten was the perfect number. I find these parts of his teachings a bit odd but the fact that we have an entire number system based on units of ten could have sprung up from this. Pythagoras started the fascination that classical painters and artist had to perfect mathematical symmetry and segmentation. He was the first person to demonstrate the relationship between numbers and musical harmonics, and his works on proportion and balance gave rise to things like the golden ratio used in art of this era.

Unfortunately, none of his personal writings on his numerical approach to music survived, but his work on harmonics and numbers was so popular it was actually taught in the schools of Plato and carried on by many Neo-Platonists, and thankfully they managed to make some surviving records of his work (Brent, J. B. ). Out side of this he also had his religious teachings though they were not passed on as much as his teachings in math and art. His religion was very strict and stated that numbers where everything. He taught about how the very creation and being of the universe itself was due to numbers and their characteristics that we discussed earlier. The people that followed him and likewise he himself were all strict vegetarians even going so far as to not wear clothes made of animal skin and oddly enough not eat beans.