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Greek philosopher and mathematician who founded a religious and philosophical brotherhood at Croton in southern Italy, which held that reality is fundamentally numerical. No writing of his own survives, and almost everything attributed to Pythagoras personally is filtered through much later, sometimes legendary, sources; the theorem bearing his name, relating the sides of a right triangle, was known and used empirically by the Babylonians and Egyptians centuries earlier, and it remains genuinely uncertain whether Pythagoras or a later member of his school produced the first general proof. Convention nonetheless credits the school with turning an empirical rule into a proven theorem.
Facts
Death PlaceMetapontum or Croton (accounts differ) 1 Wikipedia infobox gives either Croton or Metapontum; most narrative sources favor Metapontum after he fled Croton. MacTutor notes the evidence is genuinely unclear. Nationality / CultureGreek (Samian, later of Croton in Magna Graecia) 2 Defining ContributionThe Pythagorean school's conviction that number underlies reality, and the theorem, empirical long before his school, credited to it as the first general proof. 2 Notable WorkThe Pythagorean theorem and the founding of Pythagoreanism, though the theorem itself was known to Babylonian mathematicians roughly a thousand years earlier; Pythagoras may have been the first to prove it. 1 Disputed
Birth YearNo contemporary record survives; c. 570 BCE is the commonly cited scholarly estimate, reconstructed from later, sometimes unreliable, biographical traditions. Death YearNo contemporary record survives; this is a commonly cited scholarly estimate, not a firm date. BirthplaceSamos, an Ionian Greek island 2 Widely repeated in later sources but resting on tradition rather than a contemporary record. Cross-Tradition Connections
In Branch
Proofs Credited
Why this is disputed. Traditional attribution; independently confirmed proof authorship is not possible given the surviving record.
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Divinity Atlas: Pythagoras, the same subject.
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Proofs Credited: Pythagorean Theorem
Crediting Pythagoras alone with this theorem understates its independent discovery elsewhere. Chinese mathematical texts, most notably the Zhoubi Suanjing, preserve an independent geometric derivation of the same right-triangle relationship, there called the gougu theorem, on a timeline that historians of Chinese science place at or before the period conventionally assigned to Pythagoras, alongside the already-acknowledged Babylonian numerical knowledge of the relationship a thousand years earlier still. The theorem was discovered and used in more than one civilization independently; naming it for one Greek school, while a durable convention, is a convention, not a finding about priority.
A dissenting reading, from Joseph NeedhamMacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews, School of Mathematics and Statistics
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