Pythagoras is the best known mathematician because of the theorem that bears his name. However, our knowledge of him does not go much beyond this.
In fact, Pythagoras was not only a mathematician, but oddly enough, we only know what he said or did, the mathematical proofs attributed to him, his life and thoughts from the writings of his students and followers.
This most famous mathematician of the world did not write any works. His life is also not very well known.
Yet Pythagoras is said to be the first pure mathematician to suggest that everything is a number.
It should be noted that the famous theorem attributed to Pythagoras about the sides of a right triangle (Pythagorean Theorem) was known to the Egyptians, Sumerians and Chinese before Pythagoras. Pythagoras is said to be the first person to prove this theorem.
According to some, it was not Pythagoras who proved it, but his students. One of the many rules of the Pythagorean sect is that all discoveries are jointly owned.
The person who laid the foundation of our civilization
Pythagoras applied the knowledge he discovered in music to the universe. It is no coincidence that he claimed that there were ten celestial bodies in the universe. He wanted to base the framework of the universe on numbers. So… Once Pythagoras had decided that the number ten was sacred and the basis of everything, he added the celestial bodies to it. This should not surprise us.
It should not be seen as a made-up theory. For example, the discovery of the positron happened in a similar way.
Dirac claimed that a particle called a positron must exist to fill a gap in his equations. So the positron was discovered on paper, mathematically. There are many examples of this. Pythagoras did something similar.
He constructed a mathematical theory on paper and thought that in order for this theory to be symmetrical, other celestial bodies must exist.
Pythagoras’ contributions to science and philosophy
Pythagoras was a mystic. He believed in reincarnation. One day, to stop a friend from kicking a dog, he said, “I recognized it by its voice, it was an old friend I had lost”. He also gradually recruited the notables of the city of Croton into his cult, and eventually took control of the city. In the city, later
He established a kind of utopian government similar to the one Plato would describe in his work The State. When this form of government spread to other cities, it ran counter to the interests of some people and he was probably killed for this reason.
To understand antiquity, we make a mistake if we think in terms of today’s value judgments. Pythagoras being a mystic was a very natural thing in his time. He must have sensed that there were mysterious and fascinating mechanisms beneath the visible and changing face of the universe. But the means at his disposal were not sufficient for him to express this fully.
