c. 530 BCE – 480 BCE

The Pythagorean program: number as structure

Science · Europe · Italy · approximate dating

Pythagoras' school at Croton linked musical harmony to simple ratios and proposed that mathematical relations underlie nature.

Why it matters

The discovery that harmony is proportion — that the world has arithmetic bones — is arguably the founding intuition of mathematical physics and, much later, of computation itself.

People

Pythagoras

Threads

This event sits on Computation.

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Sources

  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Pythagoras