-Also, while we know a lot about the Pythagoreans and Pythagoreanism, we don't know much about Pythagoras himself.
-Pythagoras has a ton of mythology surrounding him, morseo than the other Pre-Socratics, but who knows what's true and what isn't.
-Credited with the first philosopher to fuse philosophy with math.
-A worker of miracles; considered to be a god/demi-god!
-Allegedly introduced lots of arcane and metaphysical ideas, such as reincarnation.
-Also put forth ideas about clean-living, like not eating beans or meat.
-We're pretty sure Pythagoras was from Samos, a powerful island state off the coast of Ionia (west coast of Turkey).
-Traveled across the Aegean Sea to Croton, a Magna Graecian city in southern Italy, where he founded an academy.
-Never wrote anything down (like Socrates). However, Pythagoras was a lot more private with his teachings, and his students were allegedly sworn to secrecy, almost like a cult!
-It appears (maybe) that his followers kind of split into two schools.
-The "Akousmatikoi" ("listeners") were more interested in his wacky religious and ethnic teachings,
-The "Mathematikoi" ("teachers") were more interested in his mathematical teachings.
-The Mathematikoi believed that somehow everything in the physical universe is "made of numbers".
-However, they also assigned meaning to numbers as well, and thus meanings to equations, etc. (number symbolism).
-Pythagoreanism would kind of go out of style eventually, but would make a comeback in the 1st century BC by combining Pythagoreanism with Plato's teachings, which would eventually come to be known as Neoplatonism.
-These later thinkers' writings are how we know that Pythagoras was perceived to be like a wizard or demi-god, besides being just a philosopher.
-However, around the time that Neoplatonism became really popular, Christianity was strongly competing with Greek paganism, so perhaps the pagans looked to Pythagoras as their own "Jesus" figure.
-Pythagoreans believed that math and music are also closely related, as notes and music are just mathematical ratios combined together, and that Pythagoras actually invented a bunch of musical instruments as well (highly unlikely).
-Music had a strong relationship with the human soul as well, and a human body is like a musical instrument itself in terms of how it functions. However, he also believed in reincarnation...
-This is where the roots of dualism begin.
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