The greatness of Pythagoras is that he categorizes all the various but scattered and individual sciences that accumulated before him, developed in his own time, under the discipline, and opens each of them to education as a separate science.
The path from the formation of positive sciences to the present day is both a very long and a very difficult one. Pythagoras is one of those who took the first step on this path.
Zenon, Euclid, Archimedes, the light of science that he lit passed through the most terrible darkness of the Middle Ages and delivered it to Newton and Einstein by Descartes' hand.
Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, in the Ionia region, and received a good education thanks to his wealthy father, who was engaged in trade. In his youth, he was greatly influenced by his teacher, the philosopher Pherekydes. With the advice of Thales, who was a student when he was 18-20 years old, he spent his life wandering from Egypt to ancient Al-Qaeda cities to Greece and digested all the sciences of his time.
Pythagoras of Samos (570 – 495 BC) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His political and religious teachings were well known in Magna Graecia and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, the West in general. Knowledge of his life is clouded by legend, but he appears to have been the son of Mnesarchus, a gem-engraver on the island of Samos. Modern scholars disagree regarding Pythagoras's education and influences, but they do agree that, around 530 BC, he travelled to Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a school in which initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic lifestyle. This lifestyle entailed a number of dietary prohibitions, traditionally said to have included vegetarianism, although modern scholars doubt that he ever advocated complete vegetarianism.
Thales advises him to go to Egypt to study more mathematics and astronomy. Pythagoras learns geometry and cosmology by attending the lectures of Thales' student Anaximander in Miletus. In his 20s, he goes to Egypt and becomes an active part of the liturgy with the priests, commuting between all the important temples in Heliopolis, Memphis, and Thebes, although he refused to take part in the temples, in Thebes (Lower Egypt), the oldest, sacred and revered center of hermetic practice. ) is admitted to the priesthood as the first foreign person.
About Pythagoras' life in Albert Champdor's Egyptian Book of the Dead, published in 2006, "Pythagoras continued with a great desire to study the temples in Egypt. He won the admiration and love of the priests with whom he was associated. He learned everything by hard work, without neglecting any oral teachings. He learned and took advantage of the wisdom they had from the priests. It is said that he stayed in the temples of Egypt and was initiated for 20 years, having esoteric knowledge of the rites of the gods.
In 525 BC, Persian King Cambyses II invades Egypt. Pythagoras is captured and taken to Babylon as a prisoner of war, it is not known how long he stayed there. What he learned from the Babylonians in arithmetic, music, and other mathematical sciences, he reaches the pinnacle of excellence. He returns from Babylon to Samos around 520 BC, although there is no precise record of when Pythagoras was released in Babylon. Samos passed under Persian control on this date. After a while, he establishes a school called a semicircle.
In 518 BC, due to the low number of students, he left Samos and immigrated to Crotone, a Greek city in Southern Italy, and established his own school of mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy in accordance with his own ethical rules. The combination of religion and mathematics begins with Pythagoras. He calls the school he founded a semicircle. The school has a small number of philosophers/mathematicians, called mathematikoi, who serve on the advisory board. They adapt to a vegetarian diet. This group includes both men and women. They adhered to strict rules and did not own any private property. Other listeners were called akousmatikoi and lived in their own homes with their families and were also allowed to eat meat.
Mysticism, which makes itself felt in Pythagoras' discourses, is the expression of the values he brought from Asia. It tries to create an atmosphere of fraternity around it, and justice based on equality is emphasized. Pythagoras believed that all relations would be reduced to relations in numbers, the worshiped numbers, and numerical relations. They tried to find mathematical explanations for the universe, gods, music, and so on. According to Pythagoras, the universe is a harmony of numbers.
Pythagoras mentions in his teaching:
The number one is the basic number and is equated with the entity. It creates odd and even numbers. There are two kinds of one. The first is existence. Secondly, all numbers are the absolute ones, from which the chain of beings emerges and, as a result, includes, encompasses, summarizes, and has no opposite. This is the cosmos itself.
The number two represents the universe that exists through the dissociation of unity in the number one. It expresses femininity and nature comes from this femininity.
The number three represents the triple element contained in harmony and order. This number is the first number with a beginning, middle, and end, it is a competent number, therefore it represents consciousness.
Four is the human mind, which symbolizes divine power and knows the measure between degrees. This number is also a symbol of justice.
The number five is the symbol of marriage.
Six shows the various forms of organic and vital beings. Here, 2, which is the feminine principle, and 3, which is the masculine principle, combined with the absolute 1, thus showing the continuation of the lineages.
The number seven represents critical numbers. For example, periods of seven days, seven months, or seven years play a dominant role in the development of beings.
The number eight is representative of reason, morality, and virtue.
The number nine is absolute. It also represents justice like the four.
The number ten indicates completeness in Kabbalah and Islamic mysticism as well as in Pythagorean philosophy. God, represented by the number one, reveals himself by the number 10.
Around 508 BC he wanted to become one of the Cylon mathematikoi, a Croton nobleman, but was rejected by Pythagoras. Thereupon, Pythagoras and his followers are attacked by the Cylon and his men. Their temples are burned, and their members are killed or exiled. Pythagoras first goes into exile in Tarentum, then flees with his group to Metapontium, a seaside town further north.
One of the important discoveries of Pythagoras is the relationship between music and mathematics. He discovered that by shortening the string, the sound it makes becomes thinner. Thus, he finds the relationship between harmony and integers in music. Tense strings with integer lengths are also seen to produce harmonic sounds. Applies harmony in music to the universe. According to him, the sun, moon and all the stars one by one make different sounds according to their distance from our world. Pythagoras also played the harp and was a good musician. He used music as a tool to help heal the sick.
He was the first to suggest that the Earth moves around the Sun. The greatness of Pythagoras is that he categorizes all the various but scattered and individual sciences that accumulated before him, developed in his own time, under the discipline, and opens each of them to education as a separate science. Pythagoras was a master in geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, geography, and natural sciences. He laid down the rules of optics for the first time in the field of physics and took the first step in the theories of sound and harmonics. However, the point that historians of science agree on is that Pythagoras' real greatness was in the field of geometry. His magnificent logic in compiling the scattered measurement and rule techniques, which lasted until his time, under the title of geometry and connecting them to principles that cannot be changed again, is shown as his greatest work. So much so that these principles became Euclid's Elements 250 years after him and have survived until today with only a few minor additions and comments.
But it is the common belief of geometers, and mathematicians in general, that Pythagoras' most lofty legacy handed down to mankind is his famous theorem attributed to him. So much so that although centuries have passed since the day Pythagoras first established it as a theorem and said that a geometric proof is needed for it to gain universality, the effort and effort created for the sake of seeking this proof has not lost its freshness. Moreover, this labor gave birth to today's Number Theory and formed trigonometry. He provided unlimited assistance to astronomy and formed the basis of Analytical Geometry.
The Pythagorean Theorem, which says that the sum of the squares of the right triangles is equal to the square of the hypotenuse, goes back much further. In BC Egypt, in the Nile Valley, stonemasons, and carpenters knew how to get right angles in a practical way. Archaeologists and historians are sure that the Egyptians got this information from the Babylonians because of the tablets they found. It is now known that Babylonians also exchanged information with Chinese travelers. Ancient ruins show that the Chinese used relative measures such as 6, 8, and 10 to form right angles in their buildings. But the most surprising fact is that this system was also present in the Incas. It seems that this rule, which was instinctively accepted beforehand, circulated from civilization to civilization for centuries, and most likely appeared before Pythagoras in Egypt.
It is accepted by many sources that Pythagoras died close to the age of 100, although it is not certain. However, it is claimed that Pythagoras, who left behind a bad reputation that has been the subject of books, albeit with rumors, had his student Hippasus strangled to death.