Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans

2012

Central B243 Z568 2012. (Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners of the images displayed in this online exhibition. If any issues arise from their display, please contact Special Collections, University of Otago, special.collections@otago.ac.nz)

Oxford: Oxford University Press

Pythagoras (c. 570-500 BC) was a mathematician and a scientist, in the broadest sense of the word. Born on the Greek island of Samos, he travelled as a young man to the Middle East and eventually settled in Croton in Southern Italy. Here, Pythagoras set up a ‘scientific school’ and believed, along with his followers (and modern scientists), ‘that mathematics [was] the key to understanding the universe’ (Fara). Pythagoras and his followers looked for numbers in everything. They were the first to separate numbers into odd, even, prime and composite, and also first to investigate mathematical acoustics. Pythagoras is credited by some as initiating the beginnings of science and scientific discovery. None of his writings survives.