Pythagoras

Greek philosopher and mathematician
born c. 580 bc, Samos, Ionia [now in Greece]
died c. 500, Metapontum, Lucania [now in Italy]
Main
Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the
Pythagorean brotherhood that, although religious in nature,
formulated principles that influenced the thought of Plato
and Aristotle and contributed to the development of
mathematics and Western rational philosophy (see
Pythagoreanism).
Pythagoras migrated to southern Italy about 532 bc,
apparently to escape Samos’s tyrannical rule, and
established his ethico-political academy at Croton (now
Crotone, Italy).
It is difficult to distinguish Pythagoras’s teachings
from those of his disciples. None of his writings have
survived, and Pythagoreans invariably supported their
doctrines by indiscriminately citing their master’s
authority. Pythagoras, however, is generally credited with
the theory of the functional significance of numbers in the
objective world and in music. Other discoveries often
attributed to him (e.g., the incommensurability of the side
and diagonal of a square, and the Pythagorean theorem for
right triangles) were probably developed only later by the
Pythagorean school. More probably the bulk of the
intellectual tradition originating with Pythagoras himself
belongs to mystical wisdom rather than to scientific
scholarship.