Pythagoras

Pythagoras of Samos

Born: about 580 BC in Samos, Ionia
Died: about 520 BC in Metapontum, Lucania

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Pythagoras of Samos was a Greek philosopher responsible for important developments in mathematics, astronomy and the theory of music. He founded a philosophical and religious school in Croton that had many followers.

Although the theorem now known as Pythagoras's theorem was known to the Babylonians 1000 years earlier he may have been the first to prove it.

Of his actual work nothing is known. His school practised secrecy and communalism making it hard to distinguish between the work of Pythagoras and that of his followers. His school made outstanding contributions to mathematics.

Pythagoreans believed that all relations could be reduced to number relations. This generalisation stemmed from observations in music, mathematics and astronomy.

The Pythagoreans noticed that vibrating strings produce harmonious tones when the ratios of the lengths of the strings are whole numbers, and that these ratios could be extended to other instruments.

The most important discovery of this school was the fact that the diagonal of a square is not a rational multiple of its side. This result showed the existence of irrational numbers. Not only did this disturb Greek mathematics but the Pythagoreans' own belief that whole numbers and their ratios could account for geometrical properties was challenged by their own results.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Show me Pythagoras's theorem

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. W K C Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy I (1962), 146-340 .
  4. B L van der Waerden, Science Awakening (New York, 1908).
  5. B L van der Waerden, Die Arithmetik der Pythagoreer, Math. Annalen 120 (1947-49), 127-153, 676-700.
  6. C J de Vogel, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism (1966).
  7. L Zhmund, Pythagoras as a Mathematician, Historia Mathematica 16 (1989), 249-268.
  8. H Wussing, Pythagoras, in H Wussing and W Arnold, Biographien bedeutender Mathematiker (Berlin, 1983). 
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JOC/EFR February 1996