Pythagoras …

• Pythagoras lived in Greece around 550 B.C.
• His personal facts are, like Homer, shrouded in mystery. But both Plato and Aristotle write quite respectfully of the Pythagoreans and their ideas.
• The Pythagoreans say he was a father of mathematics and science as well as philosophic and mystic ideas.
• The right triangle relationship of the Pythagoran Theorem was know for thousands of years in Iraq, China, India, and perhaps elsewhere. The Pythagoreans proved it. They seemed to be early users of proof. Many others later re-proved this particular theorem (including Da Vinci and even president James Garfield in 1876). Guinness Book of World Records says that someone found 520 proofs of it. We love it for its simplicity, importance, and Einstein wrote, "it is marvellous enough that man is capable at all to reach such a degree of certainty and purity in pure thinking." In Plato's dialogue Meno, Socrates shows that even a slave boy can come up with a simplified version of it without any schooling.
• We think he (like Plato) believed:
  • the existence of the soul,
  • the cosmos is moral - made of values if right and wrong, and
  • the cosmos runs according to certain numerical relationships.