Pythagoras and His Contributions to the

Mathematics World
Mathematics has always played a big part of every society around the world. It can be found
around us but many people do not know origins or philosophers who have contributed to
mathematics.
One of the founding fathers for mathematics is Pythagoras [1]. Pythagoras was born on the
island of Samos in the middle of the sixth century B.C. [2]. After spending some time with
Thales, he travelled widely, visiting Egypt and Babylon, where he may have gained some of his
knowledge. Then he settled in Croton where he founded a brotherhood known as the
Pythagoreans. It was a formal school, with limited membership, which was devoted to the study
of mathematics [3]. Pythagoras and his followers were struck by the many connections among
numbers. Pythagoras is said to have created the phrase All is number, which was later
modified by one of the Pythagoreans to All can be represented by
number [4].
Pythagoras and his companions were responsible for many of
the mathematical ideas used today. They viewed number as a
collection of units which could be anything [4] but in practice they
usually presented numbers as dots in sand or as pebbles. They
classified the numbers according to the shapes made by the
arrangements of the dots or pebbles. Numbers such as 1, 3, 6 and
10 were called triangular because they could be arranged as
triangles. Number 10 especially fascinated Pythagoreans because it
had 4 dots on each side of the triangle. Numbers of dots which
could be arranged in squares (1, 4, 9, 16,) were called square
numbers a term still a part of our number classification system [3].

[5]

One of the other Pythagorean ideas is best known Pythagorean theorem. Pythagoras'
theorem states that in any right angled triangle (triangle with an angle of 90) the sum of the

squares of the two sides is equal to the square of the hypotenuse [6]. However, according to
Maor [7] Pythagoras was not the first one to discover it,
the theorem had been known to Babylonians, and possibly
to the Chinese at least a thousand years before him but
probably he was the first one who proved it. This
algebraic relation was viewed to Pythagoras only as a
geometric statement about areas [7].
The viewpoint of Pythagoras about numbers would
be challenged if there was anything that could not be represented by number. This leaded to the
one of the main

[6]

points in the history of mathematics which was the discovery of incommensurable quantities,
now called irrational numbers.
Pythagoras also classified the relations between numbers. To Pythagoreans ratio between
numbers was a different type of quantity. They explored the musical scale and musical intervals.
He is credited with having noted that different scales and intervals had different properties, and
some sound more pleasing [4].
We can easily say that the influence of Pythagoras has transcended the world of
mathematics. And his name will always be around when we talk about mathematics.

Reference List.
[1] Kahn, C. H. (2001) Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History,
United States: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc
[2] Huberty M. (1996) The Geometry Center, Internet WWW page at URL:
http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~demo5337/Group3/hist.html (accessed
01/11/09)
[3] Kline, M. (1972) Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times,
New York: Oxford University Press

[4] Suzuki, J. (2002) A History Of Mathematics, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc
[5] Allen, D. (1997) Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Internet WWW page at
URL: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/pythag/pythag.html
(accessed 01/11/09)
[6] Weisstein, E. (2009) Pythagorean Theorem, Internet WWW page at URL:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PythagoreanTheorem.html (accessed
02/11/09)
[7] Maor, E. (2007) The Pythagorean Theorem: A 4,000-Year History, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press