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Comment by etothepii | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it's true but we were always taught in the History of Maths course at Cambridge[1] that Pythagoras did not exist, or at least there was no evidence of a specific person called Pythagoras. Further if you followed the footnotes in most any research on the subject (especially claims that the Egyptians or Babylonians knew the theorem) you almost always end up at a loose end.

[1] https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/about-us/staff-profiles/tutor/pier...

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Maybe its because I'm on mobile, but your link brings me to a faculty page and nothing there suggests Pythagoras wasn't a person.

I even went through the syllabus of the most closely related of their past lectures (a quick history of ancient mathematics and mathematical ideas) and I quickly realized that I don't even know which book to read to try find anything related to Pythagoras' existence.

Is there a specific piece of text I could read that would verify your claim?

For what it's worth Wikipedia has him as a real person living 570 – c. 495 BC, son of Mnesarchus, a gem-engraver on the island of Samos, who travelled to Croton about 530 BC and set up some kind of school there.

It might be the mathematical equivalent of Winston Churchill... a person who definitely existed, but who didn’t say 90% of the famous bon mots attributed to him. It might have been that if you wanted your ideas to spread you had to attribute them to “Pythagoras.”

So it works like SEO, if we mention the name of a celebrity then the site will get ranked higher in search results?

I guess they won't mind if we're thanking them. Thanks Larry Page for making the connection between academic citations and Google search results so we can all find things easily :)

Or it was discovered by his followers and students (pythagoreans), or perhaps his name become associated with people who were mathematical philosophers at the time.

Yeah, it could be a case of syncretism: Pythagoras' school was perhaps a meeting of minds that took a bunch of disparate ideas/concepts from all over the world and finally nailed them down into more concrete shapes and merged similar but equivalent concepts into grander shared abstractions. Then things like "Pythagoras's school found" and "Pythagoreans believed" accidentally over the years get rubbed off to read "Pythagoras found" and "Pythagoras believed" in a "great man fallacy/conflation" between the school of thought and the nominal figurehead.

My understanding is that is possibly an incredibly common view on Greek history. For instance, I've heard that a lot of things attributed directly to Plato today seem better attributed to platonists in general and the wild maelstrom of activity in the forums.

Getting maybe further aside and into the weeds: Pythagoreanism was even a multiple-times revived religion in Greek culture, so that would give further reason to attribute things to Pythagoras as "religious texts" things from other scholars or things from later movements (such as neopythagoreanism, which I found in one rabbit hole deep dive has a lot of interesting but unproven ties to early Christian doctrine). (Similar to how so much scholarly work in Asian history got attributed to "The Buddha" before eventually some of them started attributing things maybe more accurately to just "a buddha".)

Prof Bursill-Hall had a fascinating theory that the early Christians were to blame for Pythagoras's elevation. The Pythagorean's believed, "all was number" and identified 2 and 3 with man and woman, 5 (= 2 + 3) with children, and 10 (= 2 + 3 + 5) with God(s).

The early church trying to enforce the slightly odd concept of the trinity found solace in a triangular number being equivalent to god.

As you say, proving this would be practically impossible.

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