[tonystride]

Tbh this is a bit over my head as my music degree only qualifies me to count to four. But all joking aside, I wonder how Pythagoras would feel if he knew that one day he would be better known for this theorem and not for music?

I’m amazed by how many people I meet who don’t know about his contribution to the discovery and development of tonality! You mean the triangle guy invented music???

[dr_dshiv]

Completely agree. One can be skeptical, but the actual man is likely greater than the legend.

I own a coin designed by Pythagoras. Well, it’s from 510 BC Croton, features the tripod from Delphi, and has little snakes at the bottom. Also 10 little dots. No tetractys, but that’d be a bit much. Also, the front is the opposite of the back (Aristotle describes the Pythagorean obsession with opposites).

I mean, maybe it wasn't Pythagoras — but his father was a gold smith and it is the most beautiful coin of the era, suggesting genius. But it might have been Hippasus, who was known for having conducted the first hypothesis driven experiment of all time: casting bronze chimes in musical proportions to see if the 1:2:3:4 intervals that make stringed music consonant apply with the thickness of chimes. They do. The mathematical model generalizes.

Currently, I’m working on a textbook callout that helps students learn about fractions using musical intervals — and introduces all the DEI glory of Pythagoras (multiethnic, gender-mixed community, credited his moral doctrines to a woman, Themistoclea of Delphi, etc). I’m leaving out the fact that he was kicked out of the boys Olympics when he was 16 for being too effeminate. He won the men’s Olympics in boxing, introducing some kind of new martial arts. Then he trained the most successful Olympic athlete of all time, Milo of Croton, who won 5 consecutive Olympics. No one has done that since.

Let me know if you need sources for any of these facts, I collect them all. Pythagoras is the bessst

[pyuser583]

There was some weirdness to him too. He basically founded a religion. There were some strange ideas about the hierarchies of food, etc.

[dr_dshiv]

Well, technically he founded “philosophy” more than a religion.

Polytheism was really old, of course. But intellectual polytheism (which requires an esoteric treatment of gods as metaphors) was basically new and then lasted for 1000 years. Pythagoras is also credited with coining the term “philosophy” and the term “Cosmos.”

In addition to his coinage, he also started the first communist society. So many opposites. Music/math, religion/science, communism/capitalism, harmony/war (he conquered the sybarites), etc. He was vegetarian but, when he discovered his eponymous theorem, he sacrificed a “Hecatomb” at Delphi — that’s 100 cattle.

Of course, all of this is disputed. (But happy to provide sources for any of it).

He is textually associated with the druids and the Jews! Nuts.

[khafra]

> Well, technically he founded “philosophy” more than a religion.

If it executes a guy for revealing secrets and/or heretical discoveries, it's mroe of a religion than a philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippasus

[CoastalCoder]

> But intellectual polytheism (which requires an esoteric treatment of gods as metaphors)

This reminds me of a very funny parody of various theologies on the early Christian church:

https://youtu.be/KQLfgaUoQCw?si=8ujKk4bmCNhabbTE

[hnfong]

If you have a list of links of stuff Pythagoras did (whether disputed or not), do let me know. I'd happily gobble them up.

[Someone]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras#Attributed_discover... has a list. I think all of them are at least disputed if not outright considered untrue.

[iamshs]

Fascinating. Provide sources please. I need to learn more about this man.

[dr_dshiv]

Haha, sources for which fact? I wrote a paper that deals with Pythagoras here.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240587262...

[CoastalCoder]

"There were some strange ideas about the hierarchies of food, etc."

A food "pyramid", if you will.

/JK

[vanderZwan]

Can you share a picture of the coin, that sounds like such an amazing historical artifact, regardless of whether it's actually by Pythagoras.

(also between this and Plato's failed Olympic career I feel like there's a lot more to the ancient Greek Olympic games than I'm aware of)

[Suppafly]

>Also, the front is the opposite of the back

Unrelated, but that's generally true.

[beambot]

Fascinating. Any recommended books / bios?

[bjordnoygbi]

Most likely he didn’t come up with the theorem. He lead a cult, whose followers attributed their achievements to him and it is alleged that he himself had little interest in mathematics. I don’t know about music specifically, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the story was similar there. His core competency was religion.

[N3Xxus_6]

Where did you come up with this ? This is just not true, that Pythagoras had little interest in math. He had a love of numbers and thought that math was a way to the divine or at least understanding the divine. His philosophy, not religion , but philosophy was a way of life that entangled mathematics profusely.

[n4r9]

If I recall rightly, it's not even that clear that a single person named Pythagoras really existed. If he did then he never wrote anything down, there are few contemporary accounts of his life or work, and what details there are contradict each other. And, as you say, he was chiefly interested in things like life after death as opposed to mathematics.

[dr_dshiv]

This level of skepticism flies in the face of references to Pythagoras across multiple contemporary authors. Keep in mind that it is damn hard to prove something in the 6th century BC with the same level of evidence as today.

But Heraclitus, for instance, was contemporary and accused him of plagiarism and trickery. Why abuse a person that doesn’t exist? Ion of Chios was contemporary and said that he authored Orphic hymns.

The Orphic hymn to Apollo proclaims “your resonance attunes the whole globe”. Now, we don’t know that Pythagoras wrote that. We can’t prove that sort of thing. But it sure seems Pythagorean.

Did you know that Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton all claimed to be Pythagorean?

The man is a legend. Embrace the legend. He wrote lots of things down but he either destroyed it to avoid creating a doctrine or it was destroyed during one of the different massacres of Pythagoreans. Because that happened.

[n4r9]

The evidence for figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Heraclitus is far more compelling than it is for Pythagoras. There is a singular lack of evidence and sources for his existence.

No one is denying that a cult named the Pythagoreans existed, that many of their writings are preserved, and that they influenced Copernicus etc ...

Heraclitus was notorious for his cutting critiques of predecessors. There are a total of three very brief mentions of Pythagoras in fragments of his work (fragments 40, 81 and 129). This is not really enough to go on - it's not clear whether he's criticising someone he's met in person, some learnings that he's heard through a third party, or a cult figure that was invented and idolised by the Pythagoreans.

[dr_dshiv]

Is there any evidence supporting the hypothesis that Pythagoras was invented?

[dr_dshiv]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42026572

[n4r9]

I'm just saying it's not very clear that the figure of Pythagoras existed. It's like Robin Hood or King Arthur - maybe there was a historical person on which the mythology is based, but at this point we just don't know with any certainty.

[N3Xxus_6]

This just isn’t true either. There are contemporary sources who talk about him.

[jacobolus]

As far as we know, a developed idea of deductively proving theorems in the style of the Elements postdates Pythagoras by about a century.

[sitkack]

Musicians know a whole lot more math than they are aware of. Music is math. Even if you don't read sheet music or study the intervals of scales and chords. Musicians that become programmers write some of the best code, same for lit majors.

[mandmandam]

> You mean the triangle guy invented music???

... You know that we've found flutes in perfect pentatonic tuning that date back at least 40,000 years right (in Germany, Slovenia, etc)?

Pythagoras certainly contributed but to say he 'invented music' you'd have to ignore tens of thousands of years of history.

People were also using 'his' theorem long before he was ever born. Not trynna diminish the guy but let's give the ancestors their due.

[tonystride]

Tbh I feel like this is a ‘read the room’ situation. So if I’m on HN, providing thorough, cited sources, with as much nuance as possible is right. On the other hand, if I’m teaching a class of middle school theory students, giving them a fun digestible story about ‘the real thing about the triangle guy’ is more effective.

It’s impossible to know the true scope of how it was all made whether it’s Pythagoras and the origin of tonality or Bach and the birth of common practice. There should always be a ‘click here to go deeper down the rabbit hole’ option, but sometimes Pythagoras and Bach are easy focal points to begin delivering the concept that this all came from somewhere.