Ancient Science · Part 5 · Before the Greeks · B1–B2
The Pythagoreans and Number: Strings, Shapes and a Number That Would Not Fit
Part 5 of Ancient Science: the Pythagoreans believed that everything is number. Sophia shows what they really found, from the ratios of musical strings to a moving earth, which famous stories about them cannot be true, and the length that would not fit into any ratio. Who, which, whose, where, with and without commas, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight we meet the people who believed that everything is number: the Pythagoreans.
That is what everyone says, Marcos. But Pythagoras wrote nothing, his theorem was known in Babylon a thousand years before him, and almost every story about him was written down centuries after his death.
Something about music, something about numbers, and one thing that frightened them. Let me show you.
Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos and moved to Croton in southern Italy around 530 BCE, where he founded a community whose members shared their property, followed strict rules about food and lived by his teaching. He wrote nothing. The first Pythagorean to write a book was Philolaus, about a century later, and only fragments of it survive. The long lives of Pythagoras were written by Neoplatonists in the third century CE, eight hundred years after him.
The Pythagoreans studied numbers as things with shapes and characters. Some numbers make triangles of dots (1, 3, 6, 10), others make squares (1, 4, 9, 16). The number ten, which is 1 + 2 + 3 + 4, was holy to them: they drew it as a triangle called the tetractys and swore oaths by it.
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