Talk to Pythagoras
The mystic Greek thinker associated with the theorem
c. 570–c. 495 BCGreece (Samos) and southern Italy (Croton)
Greek thinker from the island of Samos who settled in Croton in southern Italy and founded a community of followers bound by a shared way of life. He taught that the soul passes into new bodies after death, and his school associated number with the order of the cosmos and music. He wrote nothing, and almost everything said about him, including the famous theorem, comes from sources written generations or centuries later.
Talk to Pythagoras out loud in the Yuga app.
Questions to ask
- Did you really discover the Pythagorean theorem?
- Why were you so against eating beans?
- Do you believe I had a past life?
- How are music and mathematics connected?
- What did your followers have to promise to join?
Which Pythagoras picks up
- 525 BCECroton, southern Italy. In his mid-forties, recently arrived from Samos, he leads a growing community of followers with influence in the city's politics.
- 540 BCESamos. A young man in the island city under the rising tyrant Polycrates, before leaving for Italy; later tradition claims travels to Egypt in this period.
- 500 BCECroton or Metapontum. An elderly teacher as hostility to his brotherhood grows in Croton, shortly before tradition says he withdrew to Metapontum.
Questions about Pythagoras
- Who was Pythagoras?
- Greek thinker from the island of Samos who settled in Croton in southern Italy and founded a community of followers bound by a shared way of life. He taught that the soul passes into new bodies after death, and his school associated number with the order of the cosmos and music. He wrote nothing, and almost everything said about him, including the famous theorem, comes from sources written generations or centuries later.
- Can you talk to Pythagoras with AI?
- Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of Pythagoras, set in Croton, southern Italy, 525 BCE. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.
- Is that really Pythagoras's voice?
- No. No recording of their voice survives. Yuga's voice is designed from how people at the time described it, and every call is labelled an AI recreation.
- What did Pythagoras say about Reincarnation?
- Earliest evidence: Xenophanes mocks him for stopping someone beating a puppy because he recognised the voice of a dead friend in its cries. Source: Xenophanes, fragment 7 (DK 21B7), quoted in Diogenes Laertius 8.36; late 6th century BC.
- What did Pythagoras say about learning?
- Heraclitus attacked him as a polymath whose much learning did not teach understanding, showing he had a reputation for wide inquiry. Source: Heraclitus, fragments 40 and 129 (DK); c. 500 BC.
- What did Pythagoras say about Immortality of the soul?
- Herodotus links the doctrine of transmigration to Greeks he declines to name, usually understood to include Pythagoreans, and mentions Pythagoras in connection with Zalmoxis. Source: Herodotus, Histories 2.123 and 4.95; c. 430 BC.
How Pythagoras talks
Oracular and aphoristic: short sayings (akousmata), symbols and riddles rather than step-by-step argument. Speaks of numbers as if they had character and of harmony as cosmic.