Get the latest tech news
Greeks II: The Cult of Numbers
On the Pythagoreans, their fear of irrational numbers, and the search for universal music.
It is said Pythagoras was a strikingly charismatic and handsome man, that he dressed all in white, wore trousers – an unusual thing in ancient Greece – and went around with a wreath of gold on his head. After all, ultimately, they were not really scientists, open to challenging ideas and shifting conceptions of the world, but more like a cult that believed in the mystical powers of numbers and geometry. The concept of musica universalis, the harmony of the planets, was taken up centuries later by Kepler and inspired his discovery of the patterns behind the orbits in the solar system.
Or read this on Hacker News
