Pythagoras (ca. 582-500 B.C.

) insisted that mathematical

evidence be public in the sense that his colleagues should be
able to survey the lines of reasoning. But Pythagoras actually
forbade proofs (or even theorems) from being disseminated
to outsiders. Pythagorean mathematics along with the rest of
the cult’s doctrines were sacred secrets.
This secrecy makes it difficult to divine the basis for
Pythagoras’s ritualistic insistence on proof. From what has
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been divulged, we can infer that the demand for strict
deductive demonstration issued from spiritual perfectionism.
Pythagoras taught that, as punishment, our souls are
entombed in our bodies. Our souls yearn to join the divine
celestial bodies from whence they originated. Death does not
bring release for the immortal soul because it transmigrates
into an animal that is just being born. After going through
animals that dwell on land and in the sea and in the air, the
soul once again enters the body of a human being. Eating
meat is therefore cannibalism.
The purpose of life is to live in accordance with what is
highest in us. We revere our divine origin by observing
taboos, such as by abstaining from meat, alcohol, and intercourse. More positively, we express our desire
for purity by
pursuing wisdom. Pythagoras was the first to call himself a
philosopher (a lover of wisdom).
The purest form of inquiry is mathematical. Here one
frees oneself from reliance on the senses. One proceeds
immaterially, deducing results from self-evident truths. The
uncertainties of the empirical realm are transcended.
Pythagoras’s mathematical approach to nature yielded
stunning successes. He discovered musical intervals by
inventing the monochord (a one-stringed instrument with
movable bridges). The ratios responsible for these consonant
sounds seemed to be repeated by the positions of heavenly
bodies. In addition to the mathematical relationships discovered in natural phenomena, Pythagoras
believed that they
existed in ethics. Mathematics gains a foothold in morality
through notions of reciprocity, equality, and balance.
Pythagoras used a geometrical representation of numbers that made it natural to think that the world is
generated
out of numbers. The Pythagoreans represented numbers by
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means of pebbles arranged on a flat surface. Square numbers
were constructed by surrounding one pebble with gnomons.
A gnomon is a set of units that resembles a carpenter’s square
(fig. 2.1). This notation probably helped Pythagoras solve the
arithmetical problem of finding triangles that have the
square of one side equal to the sum of the squares of the other
two. But it also suggests a way of bringing more and more of
reality under the control of numbers. By adding larger and
larger gnomons, one brings larger and larger regions into the
space surrounding the original “one.”
The numbers are the whole figure including the space as
organized by the pebbles or dots. If there were no space
between the dots, there would just be a single big dot.
Pythagoras thought of big numbers as spatially bigger. Thus,
all of reality is encompassed by the natural numbers.
Pythagoras’s metaphysical mathematics embodied an
aesthetic appreciation for beautiful arguments. Some of the
Pythagoreans’ lovely proofs are immortalized in Euclid’s
Elements.