The Contributions by Pythagoras That we can rescue throughout history are countless. His philosophy and discoveries still resonate today thanks to his disciples, who succeeded in turning the sage into a myth.
Pythagoras of Samos (570 BCE - 490 BCE) was born on an island in the region of Greek Ionia, territory that belongs to present-day Turkey.
He was the most influential thinker of the so-called Presocratic And is considered the first pure mathematician. He contributed significantly in the development of the mathematical principles of his time, of arithmetic, geometry, cosmology and musical theory. For this reason, it is considered one of the Most important mathematicians in history .
From a young age she received the teachings of Thales of Miletus And his pupil, Anaximander. Following the advice of his teachers, he undertakes numerous trips that make him travel through North Africa and East.
Finally, he established himself in the city of Crotona, in southern Italy, where he began to transmit his knowledge with the founding of Pythagorean society.
The doctrine of Pythagoras is a combination of mysticism and mathematics. The Pythagoreans were interested in equal parts by religion and science that were indivisible and were part of the same lifestyle. They worried about unraveling the mysteries of the universe and the destiny of the soul at the same time.
It should be noted that no original text of Pythagoras has been preserved. Everything we know about it comes from secondhand sources and sometimes contradictory to each other.
In addition, the members of the society he founded, professing an infinite admiration for his master, were given the task of attributing all the discoveries that were obtained, as if it were a great collective entity.
The 9 most important contributions of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans
1- The Pythagorean School
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the disciples of Pythagoras is to make him a mythical character. The Pythagorean School elevated the figure of its founder to the category of legend, because he had an inexhaustible wisdom.
Within the School knowledge was a common property and there were no individual authors, which allowed posterity to inherit all these advances to the teacher.
2- Gender Equality
Although there are some controversies about the role of women in the Pythagorean School, it is undeniable that the female sex had an important representation.
It is affirmed that at least thirty women participated as students and teachers, emphasizing Aesara of Lucania and Tantalus of Crotona (wife of Pythagoras).
Although they could not practice politics (only allowed to participate in mathematical and philosophical activities) the doors of the School were open to any gender. The philosophy of Pythagoras was dualistic and saw the woman as an indivisible complement of the masculine.
3- The Pythagorean Diet
One of the most significant goals of Pythagorean doctrine was the attainment of purity. To this end, they professed an ascetic life characterized by their lack of personal possessions and a vegetarianism Strict where meat intake was strictly forbidden.
The Pythagoreans believed in the transmigration of souls or reincarnation and did not tolerate harm to any living being.
As a curious fact, another of the precepts of the Pythagorean diet that has not been satisfactorily deciphered is the vehement rejection of Pythagoras to any type of beans.
4- The cup of Pythagoras
Legend has it that Pythagoras created a cup that promoted equity and punished greed. It is nothing else a container that empties completely if you try to fill beyond a certain level that has marked.
The device is named after a fair glass or cup of Pythagoras and in Samos, his native island, can be bought in any souvenir shop.
The ingenious mechanism of the vessel consists of a hollow cylinder in the center of the cup which, thanks to the principle that Pascal would enunciate centuries later, generates a siphon effect that empties the contents.
While we can not verify the fidelity of history, it serves to exemplify the Pythagorean idea that mathematics is everywhere, even in everyday objects.
5- Musical scale
Another story with everyday objects, places the mathematician through a smithy. Between the noise of the blows the metal managed to perceive a certain consonance.
Upon entering the premises and investigating the origin of the sounds, he discovered that the weight of the hammers were proportional intervals and that the ratio of those intervals to each other were those that generated dissonance or consonance.
That observation will define the seven basic tones of the diatonic scale used in today's music.
Another story attributes the construction of a monochord, a string instrument that achieves the same fundamental tones by varying the length of the single string.
6- Sphericity of the Earth
For the Pythagoreans, music transcended any realm, like any mathematical principle. For this reason, they thought that regular intervals also governed celestial mechanics.
Then arises the theory of music or harmony of the spheres, where each of the celestial bodies moves in the frequency of each musical note.
This reasoning made them affirm that the earth also had a spherical shape, perhaps with more poetic inclination than scientific to equip it to the other planetary spheres.
7- Numbers and things
One of Pythagoras's greatest contributions to Western thought was the systematization of abstract ideas. The Pythagoreans are the first to consider numbers as things in themselves and that form all other things in the universe.
This numeric protagonism signified the initial impulse to explain the world from constant and demonstrable phenomena where problems were not solved but principles were sought.
8- Irrational numbers, perfect numbers, friend numbers
Thanks to that preminence of number above all else, the Pythagoreans were able to observe the relations between numbers and their constants.
They thus discover the irrational numbers, which arise from the inability to express values in fractions of integers.
They will find particularities between two numbers and their even divisors and will make them"friends". For example, dividers 220 (1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110) add 284; The dividers 284 (1, 2, 4, 71 and 142) add 220.
You will also notice that there are numbers that are friends of themselves. Those will be called perfect numbers. Thus 6 is a perfect number because its divisors 1, 2 and 3 add up to 6.
One of the symbols of the Pythagorean school is the pentagram, the 5-pointed star. This figure has a close relationship with the so-called golden number, which is an irrational number whose proportion has an aesthetic character.
9- The Pythagorean Theorem
The most famous contribution that Pythagoras has bequeathed is his famous theorem for the calculation of the squares of the sides of a right triangle.
The main importance of this theorem is that it allows us to find an unknown value if we know the other two. This feature allows you to use in various disciplines and have different uses.
It gives off a series of principles that complement it, such as the relation of the internal angles of a triangle. In addition, it is one of the mathematical propositions that has more checks through many methods.
In 1942, Professor Albert E. Bosman created a fractal plane using the figure of the famous theorem that inserts Pythagoras in the most modern mathematical theories.
References
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