©^1^- VN 



GREAT MEN OF SCIENCE 

 AND THEIR WORK 



PYTHAGORAS OF SAMOS 



About 570-4^6 B.C. 



Pythagoras, whose geometrical theorem is known to every- 

 one, and who was already acquainted with the harmony 

 between notes produced by strings having simple relations 

 of length to one another, is the earliest investigator whose 

 name is associated with definite advances in knowledge. He 

 was not only the first to make the advances we have men- 

 tioned, but also, at that early date, the first to state and 

 emphasise the essential importance of measurement and 

 number for all knowledge of nature. He was the head of a 

 great school devoted to the restoration of the moral purity of 

 past times. This school was already familiar with the idea of 

 the spherical form and daily rotation of the earth. From 

 this we can judge how far those times were advanced in 

 unprejudiced thought concerning nature; two thousand 

 years later Galileo championed this idea of the rotation of the 

 earth, not against justifiable doubt concerning the scientific 

 correctness of this conception, but against the overwhelming 

 tyranny of superficial and obviously inferior minds. Never- 

 theless the time of Pythagoras must have been the beginning 

 of a decline from a previous culture, which is shrouded in the 

 mists of time; for his school aimed at the salvation of past 

 greatness. This decline appears not only in the violent end 

 of Pythagoras and his school, and later in the disgraceful end 

 of Socrates and in Plato's vain striving, but above all, in the 

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