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IPFS News Link • Religion: Believers

10 Strange Facts About Pythagoras: Mathematician And Cult Leader

• https://www.lewrockwell.com, By Mark Oliver

He was a spiritual leader with followers who thought he'd been sent from Heaven. For the Pythagoreans, math was a religious experience and some equations were divine secrets, unfit for public eyes.

When your middle school teacher showed you how to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle, you probably didn't get down on your knees and start worshiping him as a god. But when it first happened in ancient Greece, that was pretty much how people reacted.

There was a whole cult behind the man who figured out how to measure the side of a triangle, and—as you might imagine—they had some pretty strange beliefs.

Pythagoras had followers. A whole group of mathematicians signed up to be his pupils, to learn everything he knew, and to help him solve the great riddles of the universe. But this was more than just a group of people who liked math—it was a full-blown religion.


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