Pythagoras
Number as the structure of reality, taught by a secretive religious brotherhood.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 70 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Pythagoras founds a community at Croton that is simultaneously a school, a religious order and a political faction, holding property in common, believing in the transmigration of souls, and treating mathematics as the key to the cosmos. The discovery that musical intervals correspond to simple numerical ratios is the strongest evidence they had. The theorem bearing his name was known in Babylon a thousand years earlier; what is Pythagorean is the idea that number is what things fundamentally are.