Pythagoras

Greek philosopher and mathematician (c. 570–495 BCE), founder of the Pythagorean school, to whom the theorem relating the sides of a right triangle is traditionally credited.

The Pythagoreans held that number is the substance of things — that musical harmony, geometric form, and cosmic order are all expressions of ratio — fusing mathematics, music, and metaphysics into a single vision of a numbered universe.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: forebear. Pythagoras is a distant forebear of R. Buckminster Fuller's belief that the universe is coordinated by whole-number, geometric relationships. Fuller's synergetics — with its rational tetrahedral accounting, its insistence that nature uses the most economical geometric packing, and its search for the "coordinate system nature uses" — extends the ancient Pythagorean intuition that form and number underlie appearance. In the corpus's geometry-lineage sources (the histories around Coxeter), Pythagoras marks the origin of the number-and-form tradition Fuller carried into the twentieth century.

See Also

• Introduction to Geometry — Coxeter's survey carrying the classical geometric tradition forward
• Plato — inheritor of the Pythagorean number-and-form doctrine
• Archimedes — later Greek geometer of the same lineage

Sources

• The Man Who Saved Geometry (source reference) — the classical geometry lineage from Pythagoras onward