Pythagoras

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Pythagoras

• By
• Andrew Dupree

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Pythagoras Life

• Pythagoras was born to Mnesarchus(father) and
  Pythais(mother).
• They were from Samos, where he spent most of his
  childhood
• It is likely that he had two maybe three brothers

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Travels

• He traveled with his father as a young boy to
  places like Italy and to his fathers home town
  of Tyre
• He went to Egypt where he was accepted into the
  priesthood at Diospolis between the ages of 18
  and 20

• As a man he travled to Arabia, Phoenicia, Judaea,
  Babylon, and even India

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Studies

• His influences consist of Thales and Anaximander
  from Miletus
• He was well educated He played the lyre
  Could site poetry from Homer

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Prisoner of War

• Pythagoras was taken as a prisoner to Babylon
  when Cambyses II invaded Egypt in 525 BC
• No one really knows how he obtained his freedom
• He left Babylon in 520 BC and returned to Samos
• He then founded many schools and followers

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Math

• Pythagoras believed that the divine order for
  which souls return in a constant cycle was
  numbers.
• He associated numbers with form, relating
  arithmetic to geometry. His greatest
  contribution, the proposition about right-angled
  triangles
• This eventually led to the famous saying that
  all things are numbers. Pythagoras himself
  spoke of square numbers and cubic numbers, and we
  still use these terms, but he also spoke of
  oblong, triangular, and spherical numbers.

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• This is how Pythagoras came to mathematics. It
  could be said that Pythagoras saw the study of
  mathematics as a purifier of the soul, just like
  he considered music as purifying. Pythagoras and
  his disciples connected music with mathematics
  and found that intervals between notes can be
  expressed in numerical terms. They discovered
  that the length of strings of a musical
  instrument correspond to these intervals and that
  they can be expressed in numbers. The ratio of
  the length of two strings with which two tones of
  an octave step are produced is 21.
• Music was not the only field that Pythagoras
  considered worthy of study, in fact he saw
  numbers in everything. He was convinced that the
  divine principles of the universe, though
  imperceptible to the senses, can be expressed in
  terms of relationships of numbers. He therefore
  reasoned that the secrets of the cosmos are
  revealed by pure thought, through deduction and
  analytic reflection on the perceptible world.

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The Pythagorean Theorem

• His contributions to the field of math are very
  well known today, especially his contribution to
  the Pythagorean Theorem.
• The Pythagorean Theorem is Pythagoras' most
  famous mathematical contribution.

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Sources

• http//www.gap-system.org/history/Biographies/Pyt
  hagoras.html
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wik/pythagoras
• http//www.thebigview.com/greeks/pythagoras.html
• http//jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT669/Student.Folders/
  Morris.Stephanie/EMT.669/Essay.1/Pythagorean.html