Pythagoras (570 - 495 BCE) Our first stop is around 500 BCE to the home of Pythagoras. I'm so excited! We can finally know for certain the answers to so many questions. I've always wanted to know if the Pythagoreans actually could only eat certain colors of birds! There's so much speculation about Pythagoras and who he was and their secret math group. Some other speculations are that they would always take a low road instead of a high road to show their humility, they would not poke a fire with iron because fire was the symbol of truth, they wouldn't touch white roosters, why, just take a look at this video. And I thought cliques in my school were bad. The Pythagoreans got a little overprotective about their mathematics. I mean, even in the rough and scary cliques at my school, people were never thrown off a boat into the ocean because they disagreed with the clique leader. Poor Hippasus. He was just trying to pursue truth about irrational numbers.
Pythagoras' most famous contribution (assuming he is the one that actually discovered it) is the proof of the theorem named after him. If you play around with the geogebra applets here, there are a few proofs of Pythagoras' theorem. You can see what it really means for a²+b² to equal c², or as Pythagoras himself would have put it, the squares of the legs of a right triangle together have the same area as the square of the hypotenuse of that right triangle.
See which proof makes the most sense to you. With this first applet, each button is a different proof. Try them out.



This next applet is also really good at showing why the Pythagorean Theorem is true.



Where would we be without Pythagoras and his contributions to mathematics? Well, I can definitely tell you where we wouldn't be. We wouldn't be here watching him with a time machine, because we wouldn't have one! Speaking of where we should be, we better scoot along to our next stop. We wouldn't want to be here when the angry mob gets here. Having a secret society that excludes a lot of people and (occasionally) kills people within its members when they prove irrational numbers tends to make you a lot of enemies. Although I would love to see if he actually did surrender because he wouldn't trample through a bean field, I don't think I can handle watching one of my heroes die. We better go. Hang on, because we're going to go to ...