What they don’t tell you at school about Pythagoras

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They’ll tell you a lot of stuff about Pythagoras at school, like:

Pythagoras

  • He worked out that in a right angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides: that’s Pythagorean Theorem
  • Pythagoras is often referred to as the first pure mathematician.
  • He was born on the island of Samos, Greece in 569 BC.
  • Pythagoras was well educated, and he played the lyre throughout his lifetime, knew poetry and recited Homer. He was interested in mathematics, philosophy, astronomy and music, and was greatly influenced by Pherekydes (philosophy), Thales (mathematics and astronomy) and Anaximander (philosophy, geometry).

But they probably won’t tell you that:

vegetarian pythagoras

And “Pythagorean diet” was a common name for the abstention from eating meat and fish, until the coining of “vegetarian” in the 19th century.

Stick that in your triangle and measure it!! 🙂

19 thoughts on “What they don’t tell you at school about Pythagoras”

  1. Ha! Indeed. Stick that into your triangle…haha! Pythagoras got me through engineering school. If I ever forgot a formula, I could always derive it by just knowing a bit of trigonometry. You’re awesome, Violet.

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  3. Also known as Father of Psychiatry. One of first early thinkers to posit the center of thinking was the brain not the heart and that mental illness was caused by some sort of brain dysfunction. As therapy he recommended stimulating conversation, long walks, hot baths and diet of vegetables and fruits.

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  6. Fun, interesting facts. What a versatile person! Too bad there was not, as far as I know, much opportunity for women back in 500s B.C. Except for the Sphinx and a few goddesses, what the women were doing remains a cipher. Were they illiterate? Does anyone know?

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    • It’s funny you mention that because, in the interest of balance and feminism, I have been trying to find vegetarian women in history to write about in this sequence, but it’s very hard to find much written down about them. But one really good thing I found out when looking at Pythagoras was that women Pythagoreans were given equal opportunity to study and he had female as well as male disciples. Good ole Pythagoras!

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