Pythagoras

Most people only know Pythagoras because of his theorem. However, there is much more to him than just that. He was born in Samos but the exact year is not known. He travelled to places such as Egypt and Greece before moving to Croton at around 530 BC. Here he established the Pythagorean Brotherhood, a semi-religious cult/school of mathematics. He believed that everything was made up of natural numbers. Rational numbers were simply the ratio of two natural numbers. Irrational numbers didn't exist. He was actually wrong about the last point. However, he placed an almost religious significance on numbers. For example, 1 represented the universe, even numbers were female and odd numbers were male, and so on. However, his followers had strange rules. They were forbidden from eating or even touching beans. They could also not vote, due to Pythagoras being against politics in general. Some say that they couldn't eat meat because Pythagoras believed that animans were humans in past lives, which was most likely because he once recognised a dead friend's voice in a dog that was being beaten. It is not known why Pythagoras never ate beans. Some say that they represented politics. In fact, according to some authors, this caused his death. Some angry people (probably angry because they were not allowed into the Brotherhood) burned the building down, killing some members. Pythagoras, being fairly athletic, could outrun them until he got to a field. Unfortunately for him, it was a field of beans. He then said (in Greek) "Better to be slaughtered by enemies than to trample on beans" and was killed.

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