The Philosopher Pythagoras

During the same period when Polycrates was the tyrant of Samos,the island reached the height of its flourishing and glory and another renowned person gave it additional fame trough his wisdom and his works.This was the philosopher Pythagoras.The son of Mnisarchos and Parthenia he was born on Samos between 580-576 B.C.Like the births of all the famous men of antiquity there are a host of myths surrounding it.According to Porphyrios,Pythagoras was born of the god Apollo and Pythia.
He took his first lessons from the teachers on Samos.But his great thirst for knowledge made him travel far and wide.First of all he went to Miletus,the intelectual center of Ionian civilization.Later he moved on to Egypt where he studied with the Pharoah's wise men for twenty two years.From Egypt he went to Chaldaea where he was taken captive by King Camvysis and sent to Babylon.During his confinement he learned the wisdom and the magic of that strange land and also learned the secrets of its arts.


Pythagoras

About 530 bc Pythagoras settled in Crotona, a Greek colony in southern Italy, where he founded a movement with religious, political, and philosophical aims, known as Pythagoreanism. The philosophy of Pythagoras is known only through the work of his disciples.
Music was not the only field that Pythagoras considered worthy of study, in fact he saw numbers in everything. He was convinced that the divine principles of the universe, though imperceptible to the senses, can be expressed in terms of relationships of numbers. He therefore reasoned that the secrets of the cosmos are revealed by pure thought, through deduction and analytic reflection on the perceptible world. This eventually led to the famous saying that “all things are numbers.” Pythagoras himself spoke of square numbers and cubic numbers, and we still use these terms, but he also spoke of oblong, triangular, and spherical numbers. He associated numbers with form, relating arithmetic to geometry. His greatest contribution, the proposition about right-angled triangles, sprang from this line of thought:
The Egyptians had known that a triangle whose sides are 3, 4, 5 has a right angle, but apparently the Greeks were the first to observe that 3²+4²=5², and, acting on this suggestion, to discover a proof of the general proposition. Unfortunately for Pythagoras this theorem led at once to the discovery of incommensurables, which appeared to disprove his whole philosophy. In a right-angled isosceles triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is double of the square on either side.


The Philosopher Pythagoras