Pythagoras was born around 570 BCE on the Aegean island of Samos. He travelled in his youth — Egypt, perhaps Babylon, perhaps as far as India — absorbing the geometry, astronomy and music theory of those civilisations. Around 530 BCE, fleeing the tyranny of Polycrates, he settled in Croton in southern Italy and founded a community that was at once a philosophical school, a religious order, and a political movement. Members lived in common, ate vegetarian, recited hymns at sunrise and sunset, kept a five-year vow of silence, and pursued mathematics as a path to spiritual purification. From this brotherhood came the discovery that musical intervals correspond to whole-number ratios; the demonstration that the morning star and evening star are the same planet (Venus); the theorem that bears his name; and a worldview in which 'all things are numbers' and the cosmos is fundamentally mathematical. The order's political influence eventually provoked anti-Pythagorean uprisings; Pythagoras fled and died in Metapontum around 495 BCE.
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Mathematician · Philosopher · Founder of the Pythagorean Brotherhood
Pythagoras
c. 570 BCE – 495 BCE
The Ionian Greek who travelled to Egypt and Babylon, founded a religious-mathematical brotherhood in southern Italy, and put numbers at the centre of how the universe is structured.
Lifetime
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