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Pythagoras: Pythagoras Theorem
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Pythagoras was born on Samos, a Greek island in the eastern Aegean, off the coast of Asia Minor. He was born to Pythais (his mother, a native of Samos) and Mnesarchus (his father, a Phoenician merchant from Tyre). As a young man, he left his native city for Croton, Calabria, in Southern Italy, to escape the tyrannical government of Polycrates. According to Iamblichus, Thales, impressed with his abilities, advised Pythagoras to head to Memphis in Egypt and study with the priests there who were renowned for their wisdom. He ... was discipled in the temples of Tyre and Byblos in Phoenicia. It may have been in Egypt where he learned some geometric principles which eventually inspired his formulation of the theorem that is now called by his name.
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Pythagoras, for whom the famous theorem is named, lived during the 6th century B.C. on the island of Samos in the Aegean Sea, in Egypt, in Babylon and in southern Italy. Pythagoras was a teacher, a philosopher, a mystic and, to his followers, almost a god. His thinking about mathematics and life was riddled with numerology.
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Small wonder that Pythagoras's theorem became a model of what a proof is and does. In Plato's dialogue Meno, for instance, Socrates coaxes a slave boy (ignorant of geometry) to prove a simplified version of the theorem: that the area of the square formed on the diagonal connecting the corners of another square is twice the area of the first square. Socrates leads the boy to see the inadequacy of the obvious answers, provoking bewilderment and curiosity. Then he helps the boy to recast the problem within a larger, richer context where the path to the solution is clear. Socrates does this exercise not to educate the slave boy, but to illustrate to his owner what learning is all about.
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Pythagoras' senior project produced the theorem that now bears his name. He finally graduated in 554 BC. A new debate speculates that he may have been the first to come up with the NCS syndrome, the main symptoms of which are avoiding eating beans, having followers and obsessive-compulsive disorders with triangles. This was one thing Socrates was not able to get rid of.
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Pythagoras's theorem changed the life of the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588- 1679). Until he was 40, Hobbes was a talented scholar exhibiting modest originality. Versed in the humanities, he was dissatisfied with his erudition, and had little exposure to the exciting new breakthroughs achieved by Galileo, Kepler and other scientists who were then revolutionizing the scholarly world.
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Pythagoras did much more than just discover what is now referred to as the Pythagorean Theorem. Pythagoras and his followers contributed to music, astronomy and mathematics. Pythagoras believed in secrecy and communalism, so distinguishing his work from the work of his followers is almost impossible. When joining Pythagoras's group, you had to remain silent for five years before you could contribute to the group. Some of their discoveries were right, and some were proven wrong in time.
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Pythagoras Theorem