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Pythagoras,
Greek philosopher Born: Samos, an Aegean island, 582 BC Died: Metapontum, Italy, 497 BC | |||||||||
Aristotle Democritus Descartes Plato Pythagoras Socrates |
Pythagoras is said to have travelled widely in Egypt and the East. He moved to Croton in southern Italy in 529 BC where he founded a cult, marked by secrecy, ascetism and mysticism. It was politically active and sought power through estoteric knowledge. One of the earliest successes of Pythagoras was his invention of the stringed musical instrument. He discovered the ratio of length and pitch, formulating octaves, notes and harmonics as we know them today. The Pythagoreans also worked with numbers, formulating the concepts of whole numbers, fractions, square roots and irrational numbers. Pythagoras is most famous, however, for working out the theory known as the Pythagoras theorem in geometry. Namely, the square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the length of its sides. Pythagoras was the first Greek to realise that the morning star, Phosphorus, and the evening star, Hesperus, were in fact, the same star. After Pythagoras, it was called Aphrodite, and we know it today as the planet Venus. Pythagoras was the first man to teach that the earth was round. He was also the first man to point out that the planets each had a unique orbit. These views would persist for some two thousand years until the time of Kepler and Newton. | |||||||||
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