home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
The Epic Interactive Encyclopedia 1998
/
Epic Interactive Encyclopedia, The - 1998 Edition (1998)(Epic Marketing).iso
/
P
/
Pythagoras
/
INFOTEXT
< prev
Wrap
Text File
|
1992-09-02
|
658b
|
17 lines
Greek mathematician and philosopher, who
formulated Pythagoras' theorem. Much of his
work concerned numbers, to which he assigned
mystical properties. For example, he
classified numbers into triangular ones (1,
3, 6, 10,...), which can be represented as a
triangular array, and square ones (1, 4, 9,
16,...), which form squares. He also observed
that any two adjacent triangular numbers add
to a square number (for example, 1 + 3 = 4; 3
+ 6 = 9; 6 + 10 = 16;...). Pythagoras was the
founder of a politically influential
religious brotherhood in Croton, S Italy
(suppressed in the 5th century). Its tenets
included immortality of the soul and
transmigration.