God, Math and The Pythagoreans

How matter is math

During 525 B.C. the Battle of Pelusium raged, between the Persian Achaemenid Empire and Egypt. It left in its wake over 50,000 Egyptian dead and only 5,000 Persians, pitting the Pharaoh Amasis II of Egypt against Cambyses II, the son of Cyrus the Great of Persia. The Greek historian Herodotus described the aftermath of the conflict as sea of skulls littering the Nile basin. The routed Egyptians retreated to Memphis and after a bloody siege, Amasis II was captured and Cambyses became the new Pharaoh of Egypt.

Among the captured was Pythagoras, who was taken as a prisoner to Babylon. He had arrived in Egypt ten years earlier from his native Samos to study with the Egyptian priests in their temples. In Babylon as a result of his knowledge he became ingratiated with his captors and eventually studied with the Persian priestly class, the Magoi. Five years later he was released, and he returned to his home in Samos. Pythagoras would eventually settle in Crotona, a Greek colony in southern Italy.

Pythagoras’ life is intertwined with myths at the heart of the birth of philosophy, math and science. Much of Greek philosophy especially Plato’s builds on his work. He taught that all things were comprised of numbers and assigned mystical meanings to different numbers. So, for example ‘one’ represented the origin of all…