Pythagoras: The Foolish Genius

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Pythagoras, a man who is immortalized through his genius in the field of mathematics, or more specifically and more widely known the Pythagoras Theorem. A revolutionary theorem, which he created alone, which allows one to uncover the length of the missing side of a triangle by utilizing the other two sides. However, this theorem was not the only thing that Pythagoras was remembered for. In fact he is remembered for his philosophies, childhood, secret life and society, and influential adventures. The man, Pythagoras, was so famous in his time he was able to build and keep his own religious secret society, which has made it difficult to find detailed descriptions on Pythagoras’ life.
Pythagoras was born (580 B.C.-500 B.C.) and raised on the island of Stamos. While on the island, Pythagoras met two philosophers that greatly influenced him in his early life. The first of the philosophers that he met was his mentor, Thales. This man was Pythagoras’ tutor who taught him from the time he was twelve to the age of eighteen. The second philosopher was Pythagoras’ fellow student of Thales’, Anaximander. Both of these men helped to sculpt Pythagoras’ great mind during his teenage years. However, Pythagoras did not just learn from Thales and Anaximander. Sometime between the age of eighteen and twenty he traveled to Egypt to learn the finer points of Geometry.
After his journey to Egypt and back, Pythagoras returned with much philosophical knowledge obtained through either experience or observation. For example, Pythagoras philosophized that numbers were not just the way to truth. He believed that through mathematics one could attain harmony in life. He proposed thousands of theorems like the one above, each said to be unique and enlightenin...

... middle of paper ...

...em. He may have been remembered for more though if he would have only taken the time to write down what he said. However, even if he did write down other theorems I am sure that his secret society would have hid them away along with the documents containing details about the last forty years of his life. This is why Pythagoras is considered to be the foolish genius.

Works Cited

Online article
Bernholc, E.D. (2011)
The Pythagorean Theorem: The Way of Truth
Pythagoras in life,
Retrieved from http://www.ancient.eu.com/article/213/

Encyclopedia
Huffman, Carl
“Pythagoras”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Fall 2011 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/pythagoras/

Official website
J’J.O. (1999, January)
Pythagoras Biography retrieved from http://www.history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/biographies/pythagoras.html

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