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Beyond the theorem
Or maybe not.
The ancient Greek philosopher is the subject of my son's research project, and I helped him get a head start by looking up some information.
"Pythagoras had his own cult," I told him. "And he may have been killed when the neighbors burned down his house."
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You may be familiar with the "school" version of Pythagoras: He came up with the Pythagorean theorem, which addresses right triangles (a2 + b2 = c2). Your eyes probably glazed over every time the teacher brought it up in trig class.
Then it was on to sines, cosines and tangents. Yawn.
Meanwhile, they never told you that Pythagoras' life story might have made for a good episode of "You Are There." Besides his theorem, he had a lot of other bright ideas, such as the notion that the heavier the object, the lower-pitched sound it makes.
He applied that to the strings of an instrument, and voila! He just may have been the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Jimi Hendrix's electric guitar.
Or ...
Pythagoras' minions might have figured all that stuff out, but it was attributed it to their leader. See, he ran a secret society that left no written records, and it wasn't until centuries later that folks like Aristotle began jotting down information about him.
Speaking of the secret society, consider these tidbits we found on a website called The Story of Mathematics:
"Pythagoras imposed his quasi-religious philosophies, strict vegetarianism, communal living, secret rites and odd rules on all the members of his school," including edicts about never urinating toward the sun, never marrying a woman who wears gold jewelry and never eating or touching black fava beans.
Whoa.
Eventually his neighbors seem to have gotten paranoid about an anti-fava bean cult living nearby, and they apparently destroyed the Pythagorean home base and plenty of Pythagoreans in the process.
As for Pythagoras, that's how me might have died. Or perhaps, according to other conjectures, he wandered off and starved himself to death. Maybe the only things to eat where he wandered off to were fava beans.
And as for the Pythagorean theorem, historians seem to think the Babylonians and possibly the Chinese had that all sussed out that long before Pythagoras was born. But they didn't have Aristotle as their PR man.
At any rate, my son should end up with a project that's a bit more interesting than simply a2 + b2 = c2, thanks to exploring history beyond the "stuff in school."
Online editor Harry Funk can be reached at hfunk@observer-reporter.com.
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