Pythagoras
...ng to play the lyre, learning poetry and to recite Homer, along with being very advanced in the field of mathematics. Pythagoras was influenced by three main philosophers as a young man, the most important one was Pherekydes who was often described as the teacher of Pythagoras. The other two were Thales of Miletus and his pupil Anaximander. Thales was a very old man when he taught Pythagoras but is credited for getting him interested in mathematics and astronomy. Anaximander was interested in geometry and cosmology and many of his ideas would influence Pythagoras’s own views. In 535 BC Pythagoras went to Egypt were he visited numerous temples and took part in many discussions with priest and was accepted into priesthood after completing the rites necessary for admission. Then in 520 BC, after a brief stage in which he was taken prisoner after the king of Persia invaded Egypt, Pythagoras returned to Samos. There he founded a school in which he called the semicircle. There the Samians would hold political meetings and at a special gathering place Pythagoras would spend his days teaching philosophy and doing research on the uses of mathematics. Then in 518 BC he left Samos and went to southern Italy where he founded another philosophical and religious school in Croton. It is said that Pythagoras left Samos because the Samians didn’t like his method of teaching and treated him in an improper manner. At his new school Pythagoras was head of the society in which there was an inner circle of followers known as the mathematikoi. They lived permanently in the society quarters and followed their rules very religiously. Then there was the outer circle that was known as the akousmatics who were able to do some of the things that the inner circle couldn’t like eat meat and own possessions, along with living in their own houses. Very little is known about the actual work that took place in the society because the school practices secrecy and communalism. All that is certain about his school is that they made outstanding contributions to mathematics. It was also explained that Pythagoras and the mathematikoi did study mathematics but they were not a research group and there were no open problems for them to solve. They were interested in the principles of mathematics, the concept of numbers, the concept of a triangle or other mathematical figures, and the abstract idea of proof. Pythagoras took the data from these studies and associated them to observations in mus...