Pythagoras (570 BC-495 BC) was an Ionian Greek philosopher whose political and religious teachings were extremely influential in Magna Graecia and exerted a profoud impact on the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and several other key figures in Western philosophy. He was also a very important mathematician and scientist who created the Pythagorean theorem, the sphericity of the Earth, and the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus.
Biography[]
Pythagoras was born on the Greek island of Samos in 570 BC, the son of a seal engraver. In 530 BC, he traveled to Croton in Magna Graecia, where he founded a school in which initiates were sowrn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic, and vegetarian lifestyle. After founding this religious brotherhood, he became a well-known philosopher. Through his knowledge of numbers, he discovered invisible realities, and he argued that, behind the flux of phenomena, there was an intelligible concept. He was also the first to use the term "philosophy" to describe his love of knowledge. Pythagoras' discoveries and inventions included the Pythagorean theorem (for measuring the hypoteneuse of a triangle), the five regular solids (four-faced tetrahedron, six-faced cube, eight-faced octahedron, twelve-faced dodecahedron, and twenty-faced icosahedron), the planet Venus, the word philosophia ("love of knowledge"), the sphericity of Earth, and the climactic zones of the world. Following Croton's victory over Sybaris in 510 BC, Pythagoras' followers came into conflict with supporters of democracy and Pythagorean meeting houses were burned. Pythagoras was either killed during his persecution or died in exile in Metapontum (Metaponto, Basilicata).