Pythagoras: Number – the master of forms and the ideas

Pythagoras is remembered still thanks to the theorem called in his honor. And though, Babylonians and other people were familiar with this theorem for one thousand years to it, Pythagoras became the first who proved it.

Not clear sources

Pythagoras was a figure so outstanding that about him composed a set of stories, and now it is hard to say that from them the truth and that fiction. It is known that he was born on the Greek island of Samos about 550 B.C. Possibly, he visited Miletus and, maybe, even studied at Thales. Pythagoras also made trips to Egypt and Babylon where priests and magicians could acquaint him with fundamentals of geometry on which its theorem is based.

Such triangle which received the name tetractys was for Pythagoras a sacral symbol.

Pythagoras's school

In 520 B.C. Pythagoras returned home, and in two years, in 518 B.C., went to the island Crotone (now the Province of Calabria, Italy) where created the philosophical school. His pupils considered a human soul immortal, believed in resettlement of souls and fell into the life as to one of the embodiments necessary for acquisition of internal experience and clarification of soul.

The school totaled about 2,6 thousand pupils among whom there were not only young men, but also girls. They were divided into two parts: an internal circle – an award (union), and external – their listeners. Life of pupils submitted to rigorous rules: they surely were vegetarians, wore special clothes, went barefoot. They had the secret sign – a pentagram in the form of a five-pointed star in a pentagon.
Members of school connected the life with laws of mathematics as, according to Pythagoras, the number is the cornerstone of everything. Odd numbers correlated to a machismo, even – with women's.

Tell that when Pythagoras found the proof of the theorem which bears his name now, he sacrificed a bull.

Pythagoras loved music. They say that somehow he missed smithies and paid an attention to sounds which are made by hammers of different weight at blow. He studied the sounds made by the tense strings and mathematically calculated laws of a harmonious number of sounds.